The future of photography [Archive] - Large Format Photography Forum

Michael Alpert

23-Nov-2011, 17:41

I wonder if the use of a view camera directly correlates to a lack of interest in the future of the medium in favor of its past. Any forward-looking LF photogs here, and if so, how does it manifest in your photography?

You imply a direct connection between the future of the "medium as an art form" and the specific technology being used. Today there are many many painters who still use brushes and sticky paint, which is a far older technology than photography. Poets still use pencils. "Forward-looking" is in itself a problematic term. Who defines "forward looking"? Was Van Gogh trying to be forward-looking or was he trying to be true to himself? It seems to me that the worth of any art or art-form has more to do with its truth-telling than its technology. One can be trite while using the latest technology or while using traditional technologies. I also think that one always lives in all dimensions of time, the past and present as well as the future. One lives in the present with both memory and anticipation. To be concerned about where we as a species are going is tremendously important. That concern is informed through the study of the present and the past.

Lachlan 717

23-Nov-2011, 17:51

Its impossible to know the future till you are in it.

Doesn't this statement contradict itself?

mdm

23-Nov-2011, 17:58

No, when you are in the future its the present.

Lachlan 717

23-Nov-2011, 18:06

If it's impossible to know the future, how can you know that it's impossible to know the future?

r.e.

23-Nov-2011, 18:34

Anyone else thinking about the future of the medium?

For several reasons, ranging from the human desire to want to know what happened, or remember what happened, to enforcing laws and to advancing political positions, human beings have an almost insatiable desire for objective recordings of the present. Cameras and sound recorders do that better than any other technology. The change from film and tape to ones and zeros, and the ability to store those ones and zeroes in tiny devices, makes it significantly cheaper and easier to make these recordings. The result is that visual and sound recording are exploding. The question isn't whether these media have a future, but when it will be possible to record events in 3D with sound that fully duplicates what an observer of the events would have heard from any physical position in relation to the events. This is clearly coming.

To address your question about the future of photography as an art form, the main issue is what people will do with this technology to inject subjectivity into, and manipulate - subvert, if you will - the greater objectivity, compared to drawing, of which the technology is capable.

The second question for artists is where to draw the line between still images and moving images. Yesterday, while looking at the web site of a photographer who has put together a portfolio of images from Occupy Wall Street, I came across the phrase "motion portrait". He uses it to describe a cross between a still image and moving images. It is a phrase that is new to me, but perhaps emerging.

The third question for artists is where to draw the line between images, still or moving, and sound.

The one thing that is absolutely clear, from the Arab Spring to what happened at UC Davis a few days ago, is that photography has a future, and that cheap video/sound recorders, and a camera in every cell phone, have consequences that I suspect very few people understood.

As the cliché goes, my two cents.

Jay DeFehr

23-Nov-2011, 18:56

Maris,

You seem conflicted.

In general media do not evolve..

On the other hand non-photographic picture-making has a long way to evolve...

A stone mason's chisel, a painter's brush, a photographer's camera need to be the way they are to do their necessary work.

I think the use of clever mark-making machines, shape-making machines, printers, etc, controlled by electronic files has only just begun to flourish.

Thanks for your thoughts.

23-Nov-2011, 19:58

I don't see anything going away... I see video playing a bigger role in the reporting/documentary aspect of imaging. Video replacing the written news article is already starting to happen, and it's annoying me, who wants to quickly scan a web news article and continue on. It'll be a method to keep your eyes on the page (with it's advertisements) for a fixed amount of time, which you can't do with text.

I forsee a decline in image quality standards. Technical factors contributing to this would be the use of video frames as stills, flourishing acceptance of cell phone camera, and new and immature ways of viewing shared imagery.

Resulting or contributing artistic observations would be a preference for less literal imagery; from an overload of reality-centric images on facebook/flickr, etc.... I think a revival in soft/pictorialism will be a minor part of this (which think is an upside for that niche), as people look to revive proven ways to express themselves photographically. As most people's standards suffer, high end straight photography might seem simplistic (bad) or been-there-done-that by everyone with a 100 megapixel $500 dslr.

I also forsee a continued flourishing of online communities like this place and apug, et.al. for people to learn and be inspired regarding their photo interests.

jcoldslabs

23-Nov-2011, 22:39

I think it is difficult to separate a concern for the availability of tools and materials (the literal medium) and the practice of the art itself. Those whose art is made with large format cameras, large format film and large format optics are right to worry about the ability to continue working with the tools they have learned to use in the practice of their art. (Although I agree that the concern for the dwindling manufacture of current photographic materials can induce myopia.) Is there a future for painting if all brushes, canvas, paints and pigments are no longer available? A daguerreotype, for example, is a specific type of photograph that by its very nature is tied to the technology that produces it. So, too, will future photographs (however so defined) be tied to whatever technology is used to create them.

As far as being "forward-looking" photographers, we must use the tools we have until new tools are developed. What those tools will be, how they will be used and what art will be made with them is a fascinating thought experiment but not something I worry about when I set up my camera and begin composing an image. So in answer to the opening question, concern for the future of the medium and/or the art form does not knowingly affect my practice of the art in the present, but I am eager and excited to see what changes time will bring.

(Having said all that I do not consider myself an artist at all, just a guy who takes pictures, so a grain of salt is certainly advisable here.)

Jay DeFehr

24-Nov-2011, 05:05

Michael,

I didn't imply a direct connection between a specific technology and the future of the medium, I wondered about a correlation between a specific technology and its users' attitudes about the future of the medium, and those are very different things.

I'm not clear about your problem with the term, forward-looking; its definition is self explanatory. Not everyone looks forward in their work. Civil War photography re-enactors, for instance, are not interested in looking forward regarding their photography, but in recreating the past as faithfully as possible. Others are unapologetic about emulating Ansel Adams, or any other photographer. Not everyone is interested in breaking new ground. Van Gogh, by all accounts was interested in breaking new ground. As for "being true to himself", I don't think the two aims are mutually exclusive, do you?

I'm not sure what you mean by "truth telling"; care to elaborate?

Certainly we make predictions based on our memories, and that could be expressed as living in all dimensions of time, if we can agree we're speaking metaphorically.

Where we're going as a species is a much bigger question than I posed, but I agree it's an interesting one.

r.e.,

I think you've made an important point regarding objectivity/subjectivity. Photography can never be completely objective or subjective, or can it? I'd love to know your thoughts.

Photography morphing into a different/richer media is a good example of what I had in mind when I asked about forward looking. Moving images are by definition not photography, so I'm not entirely sure what you mean by " a cross between a still image and moving images", but I have some ideas. Traditionally, motion pictures consisted of a series of still images projected sequentially. Frame rates determine the realism of the motion. If frame rate is reduced sufficiently, the motion picture becomes a series of still images, and that line could be blurred, I think. High speed cameras designed to record explosions can record hundreds of frames in a second, which is not an uncommon exposure duration for a single image. A motion capture of an unmoving subject looks much like a still image, though some argue that a projected image is not truly a photograph.

3D is a little stickier. Stereo photography is nearly as old as the medium itself, but holography is something distinct. I'm not sure how 3D imaging could be defined as photography, but I'm open to arguments.

Your last comment might be most prescient. The preeminence of share-ability as a photographic quality might be more consequential to the future of the medium than any other quality. Thank you for your very thoughtful comments.

jp498,

I'm not convinced by your argument for a decline in technical standards based on the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, or the ease of sharing. After all, low quality imaging systems have been around as long as photography has. I'll argue in favor of the quality of my 8MP iPhone camera images over the quality of several MF box cameras I've owned, despite the far greater "image information" in a frame of MF film. A similar argument goes for image sharing as a factor. During my childhood, the most common/convenient way to share images was by the use of a Polaroid instant camera, and none I ever saw come close to the best images I've seen on the screen of an iPad, or even an iPhone.

As for "reality-centric" (realistic?) images on FB, Flickr, etc., I don't see any shortage of Photoshopped/ heavily processed sci-fi, fantasy, vampire, goth, romantic, etc. images there, too.

Are sites like this one, apug, etc., flourishing? If by flourishing you mean growing rapidly, I'd be surprised if that were true. I'd expect new memberships to be slowing, perhaps even dramatically, but not accelerating.

jcoldslabs,

I agree that photography is tied to technology, but I don't think anyone is suggesting the technology to make photographs is in danger of disappearing.

Thank you all for addressing my questions so thoughtfully. I hope the discussion will continue.

Doug Howk

24-Nov-2011, 05:59

There has been a similar discussion at the Swings & Tilts Blog about whither photography. For fine art photography I see two trends/directions. For those doing digital and appealing to the consumer market, there will be a conjoining of stock photography and print on demand models. A consumer could, for example, select from a large stock/fine art inventory, have it printed/matted/framed by their local gallery/framing shop. The value of the print itself will be minimal, and discarded when tastes change. The photographer will be paid based on his image usage. For some, small usage payments could add up to a good income; but it would depend on name recognition/marketing. There will still be the high-end conspicuous consumption of the 1%'ers that benefit those like Hirst & Gursky; but most artists will spend more time trying to market themselves.Their post-process time may actually be reduced thru automated software.

The other direction will be those who explore traditional photo techniques especially alt processes. Their prints will be valued as objects. Many of the alt process techniques were never fully explored due to the appeal of technological changes/"progress". The consumer appeal will be hand-crafted objects.

jcoldslabs

24-Nov-2011, 07:06

Jay,

I didn't mean to suggest that the tools for making photographs are disappearing, only changing. To risk sounding trite, it is the skill (and often luck) of the photographer that matters and not the tool used when creating a photograph. Personally I take far greater pleasure in the act of making a large format photograph than I do a cell phone snapshot. The satisfaction with the process is what drives me, not the end result. If in the future there are affordable, high quality digital backs for my 4x5 and 8x10 cameras I will gladly use them as my experience of taking photographs will remain intact, although the act of processing of the images will not.

Just as vinyl records have found their niche in the world of digital music delivery, so too will traditional analog photography (and so-called 'alternative processes') stake out its specialized territory amid the wider digital world. It may be that for the vast majority of photo consumers viewing a photograph on their phones will be the end point in their interaction with the image. Audio purists decry the poor quality of compressed MP3s in much the same way I would imagine LF photographers might scoff at their images being viewed on a screen smaller than the original negative, but what's to be done? If phones and tablets are the future of computing it stands to reason that high quality cell phone cameras will be the Brownies/Instamatics/Polaroids of their time. Ubiquity trumps quality--just ask the winners of the VHS/Betamax wars, among others.

A good topic and one well worth delving into. As a relative newcomer to these forums I'm glad to read the other thoughtful responses.

Jonathan

James Hilton

24-Nov-2011, 08:25

I suspect collecting photographs will continue to increase in popularity (at least I hope it does). And we will no doubt see new record prices for prints going forward (which for many art collectors seems to almost be a stamp of approval to jump on the band wagon).

The popularity of old processes such as albumen, carbon, wet/dry plates, platinum (film maybe?) etc etc will probably continue to rise (something I didn’t think I would be saying even a decade ago). Maybe this is the direction that many "fine art" photographers will head to in an attempt to distinguish themselves from a mass market digital world.

With regard to the mass market, I think people will take more and more photos (perhaps mostly with smart phones) and share them on the web or send by email etc, but physically print less of them.

I have used the word maybe lots of times here, but one thing I am sure about is photography as an outlet for expression and creativeness, and as something that people can do for enjoyment has a bright future.

tgtaylor

24-Nov-2011, 09:19

According to String Theory the past, the present, and the future are but illusions.

Jay DeFehr

24-Nov-2011, 12:46

More great comments!

Doug,

I'm not sure how realistic is your prediction about future photography markets. I think there will be more than enough free images available to displace usage fees, and I think print on demand could disappear when cheap, thin, flexible, high definition displays are widely available. Print on demand is more likely, in my opinion, to be a viable model for 3D objects.

As for the alt processes, I think the limitations of that technology will keep it out of the avant-garde. I don't see anyone using alt processes in new ways, but I'd be interested to know if someone is.

Jonathan,

I think I understand. To be clear, I'm not as interested in photography as a profession or a hobby, or as snapshots shared online, though the lines dividing any of the above from the artistic medium are not absolutely clear.

Regarding camera phones becoming " the Brownies/Instamatics/Polaroids of their time", that's not so much a prediction as an observation, and on a quality basis, I don't think camera phones give any image quality away to those old systems.

James,

Your comments are closely aligned with Jonathan's, and my reply to him applies to your comments, as well.

Thomas,

The natures of time and of reality are far from settled, scientifically speaking. Thanks for the reminder.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

John Kasaian

24-Nov-2011, 13:03

The future? Luminous! :D

redrockcoulee

24-Nov-2011, 14:45

I would think that those who shoot with large format cameras would be more interested and more concerned with the future of their supplies than those who do not shoot film at all. So yes there would be a correlation.

Jay, I am not sure that forward thinking is a term without a positive cognation implied and that also has the associated negative meaning for those who are not thinking along the same lines. I know I am no more or less forward thinking when I go out with my 6 month old dSLR than with my decade old 4X5, at least in the term of my photography. That is I select the format and medium for what I want to acheive or what I wish to carry that time rather than if one is with more modern technology and the other is old fashioned. Perhaps I am backward thinking in wanting to do more pinhole work but then I just did some of that on the digital so is that forward-backward thinking or just spinning my wheels.

Overall an interesting topic but I see some of the terms as being loaded. After all digital could be replaced by something totally new in ten years so is one even forward thinking going digital? My future in photography is that I am going to take photos that I have not yet. I think that there will be materials available for me to do so for the next two decades and after that I most likely will not be taking much anyways if I am still around.

Heroique

24-Nov-2011, 14:48

The future? Luminous! :D

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades: :cool:

rdenney

24-Nov-2011, 16:46

As access to the medium becomes easier and easier and as equipment and software make achieving a given level of craft more easily attainable, more and more people will use it, and the art they produce will become increasingly democratized. That is how standards of craft will change, and in the appraisal of many here diminish. Also, people will view it using display technologies that favor bright colors and that do not provide large enough displays to demonstrate abundant detail. Others will see it differently. But a certain outcome is that it will become even more difficult to separate what is good and important art from what is trivial and cliche. So, the future of photography is one of more difficulty producing important art merely by virtue of superior craft. This has always been true, but it is made more true by the increasing difficulty in distinguishing superior craft in increasingly predominant display methods.

Rick "suspecting pre-Impressionist painters probably asked the same questions when people started paying attention to the Impressionists" Denney

Jay DeFehr

24-Nov-2011, 17:35

jnantz

24-Nov-2011, 20:04

hi jay

i have no idea how the medium of photography will evolve as an artform.
it has taken 172 years for us to get here ... and for some time is goes backwards
not forwards. the more technology advances, the more solidly the feet are planted
on the ground, the more "perfect" images are created, the more "imperfectness"
becomes almost a trademark for 'art" ...
it will be interesting that is for sure ;)

Jan Pedersen

24-Nov-2011, 20:45

jnanian, agree 100% but i am not sure that the people buying the art are in agreement.
I like to think that those who go against the mainstream to make imperfectness and hand made prints that can not be duplicated instead of the overmanipualted computer created images which does not have much left from the image that was captured on the camera sensor and, can be duplicated in thousands of images will have the upper hand but will they?

Doug Howk

25-Nov-2011, 04:35

Don't know if the buying public will recognize the value of hand-crafted prints, but there certainly has been a resurgence of artists interested in the older processes. A forthcoming documentary (http://www.artistsandalchemists.com/film/about) explores some of the processes. There is also Lyle Rexer's book on these processes as part of the future of photography: "Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes"

jcoldslabs

25-Nov-2011, 04:44

redrockcoulee

25-Nov-2011, 12:10

red,

I'm not sure how one's choice of equipment correlates to one's tendency to look ahead, which is one reason I asked the question. I don't think there's any question many members here are more interested in the technology, processes and aesthetics of past eras than they are in breaking new ground, and I have placed no value judgement on either tendency. It's interesting that you and at last one other person seem sensitive to the notion that you might not be seen as forward-looking, or that there is some inherent value to looking forward, or some shame in not doing so. For what it's worth, I don't think the use of a lens instead of a pinhole, or a digital sensor instead of film (or paper, etc.) necessarily makes one's work more cutting edge.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Jay

My point was that you seem to be asking about those interested in looking to the future however in my mind the terms forward thinking or foreward looking implies, regardless if intended or not, judgemental wording. So my response was to the wording that you used and if I am sensitive it is because it seems like loaded wording as opposed to the idea of surveying to see if we as a group are less likely to be thinking of what lies ahead in the world of photography than any other group of photographers. If you visit sites that are more concerned with digital photographic equipment there are all those thread about what is the newest gear or what they like the very next model to be able to do but overall they, like medium and large format photographers are photographing with the materials available now. Some digital photographers may be more likely to be looking to the very near future as there most likely will be new features available to them next year but down the line, I just do not know how much of a difference there would be between them hence could not answer that.

Greg Blank

25-Nov-2011, 18:42

This is very perceptive and poignant observation, I remember a quote quite some years back from Duane Michals that went: "If your going to be a Photographer your going to need to be a Photographer for life". People that make this decision care less about how they do what they do and more about why they are doing it. In my opinion they tend to stick with the process they have been doing so that they can make a greater statement with the tool set chosen. This is not to say do analog or digital or even that one can not reevalate ones tools with time, but do have integrity. That is beleive that the work you create will have value and hold meaning and is not being created with the intention of eventually being replaced.

" if I am sensitive it is because it seems like loaded wording as opposed to the idea of surveying to see if we as a group are less likely to be thinking of what lies ahead in the world of photography than any other group of photographers. ....<snip>. what they like the very next model to be able to do but overall they, like medium and large format photographers are photographing with the materials available now.

paulr

26-Nov-2011, 00:12

Szarkowski was one of the first to observe a causal connection between the technological history of the medium and the art history of the medium. When something new becomes possible or easy, artists start incorporating it.

Adams and Cartier Bresson provide a couple of examples. Faster, panchromatic film allowed photographers of Adams' generation to make clouds and changing light significant aspects of subject matter. The leica and fast 35mm film allowed C.B. to photograph transient scenes that were previously available only to first hand experience.

We can expect technological change to influence the future of the art just as it's influenced the art's history and present. Certainly the virtualization of images brought on by the digital age will continue as an undercurrent. And the increasing democratization and ubiquity of photography will continue to be a factor, as it's been since the late 19th century.

But I don't think technology will be the biggest or most important influence on photographic art. The world is changing rapidly in many ways, with cultural and art critical narratives changing along with it. We're half a century into postmodernity, and many of the dominant ideas of the last several decades are starting to feel tired or entrenched in equal parts. It's too early to know where the next dominant narratives will lead, but they'll undoubtedly lead somewhere different. Photography, video, and film are bound to play a part in defining what's next.

MDR

26-Nov-2011, 04:09

dwross

26-Nov-2011, 08:38

The future of photography on a personal level can be summed up in the simple question: what will be my next photograph? Each time I answer this question I am simultaneously asking it again.

And so it goes.

Absolutely agree.

How can art be anything but personal? Like any photographer, I can hope that a collector or client will appreciate/purchase my work, but that is unrelated to how or why I make the work. That gets said a lot here, and better than I can express, but I don't think it can be repeated too often.

I hope the future holds a multiplicity of visions, instead of an imposed consensus of what cutting-edge photographic art is "supposed to" be. If we can all hold on to our own visions, the future of our craft is going to be a show to watch. The merging of past and present technologies could (and almost certainly will) yield some incredible visions. Photography has always been a medium like no other -- driven by technology and materials, but still defined by the photographer one photograph at a time.

d

paulr

26-Nov-2011, 09:15

Photography hasn't really changed in the past 100 years since Strand's Straight photography, Sanders Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new topographic movement and St. Ansel. Gursky style photography is a basically Gustave Le Gray only in color. Composite photographs = Rejlander. Leicas Style Street photography was already done in the 1890's so not even HCB Style is new. Photography hasn't eveolved as an art form but it has evolved on a technological level and I don't see much changing in the future.

You're talking about basic techniques rather than philosophical underpinnings and perspectives on the world.

In terms of technique, sure, I don't think anything's new since the 19th Century besides color and the dis-embodiment of the image (first through mechanical reproduction, and then more thoroughly through digital media). But as far as esthetics and philosphy, which matter much more than nuts and bolts, everything has changed.

MDR

26-Nov-2011, 14:13

Paul
In fact I was talking Aesthetics except for le gray (or including) all my examples have a contemporary counterpart that is hailed as the best and newest thing while in reality they just copy old aestethics with newer tools.

Dominik

paulr

26-Nov-2011, 15:37

Dominik,
this is heading toward a conversation that would strain the limits of an internet forum. I'll just skip to the conclusion that I disagree profoundly, in the sense that the central work of the last fifty years is based on historical and philosophical assumptions that are not only different from the work of the early modernists (to say nothing of the Romantics) but that are in many cases incommensurable with them.

To say that Le Gray and Gursky were doing similar work because they both composited images it to willfully miss the point of what either did. Even with closer kin, like Walker Evans and Bernd and Hilla Becher, it's a great mistake to consider them fundamentally similar because of their surface esthetics.

Unless I'm reading you wrong, you are trying to conflate romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism because of some similarity of technical methods.

MDR

27-Nov-2011, 03:26

Your absolutely right Le Gray is a bad example as are most of the 19th century photographer but starting in the 1920' we have a lot of common ground with modern photographic views (philosophical and aesthetical). August Sander and the Becher's were part of the Neue Sachlichkeit, Gursky and most of the currently famous german modern photographers were Becher pupils. Neue Sachlichkeit (1920's) = Aesthetic and philosophical view. Ansel Adams was a damn good photographer but as has been stated numerous times by photo historian basically a 19th century landscape photographer. The new topographic movement and a lot of today's Landscape guys have a lot in common not only in terms of visual aesthetics but also in terms of the message they wanted to convey. Photography as an art form certainly has evolved in that your right but not necesseraly in the context of the art world, where most philosophical views are nothing but bull.... There are of course some exceptions but not too many

MDR

27-Nov-2011, 05:34

Paul if my post sound to harsh or is to much of a generalization for you I hereby apologize to you and to any member that might take offense with my postings in this thread

Dominik

Jay DeFehr

27-Nov-2011, 15:21

Rick,

Thanks for posting; I always enjoy your perspectives. I think the democratization of technical excellence is an important issue regarding the future of the artistic medium, but it's not a new issue, is it? I see the issue as being inherent to the medium, in a way. Photography as mechanical reproduction made the rendering of perspective, fine detail, proportion, etc, automatic within the limitations of the technology, but the technology was itself an obstacle to one degree or another, throughout the history of the medium, and is only now become negligible. I suspect this fact alone to have important implications for the art form, and that is what I'd like to discuss. Once craft is automatic, how is the art form changed?

Regarding the limitations of digital displays, I think you're unreasonably pessimistic. That technology is advancing exponentially, and it won't be long before digital displays of any size surpass printed images, and more closely resemble a transparency on a light table than an image on a current technology display. More important, perhaps, than the image quality, will be the image intelligence. Imagine an image that senses the viewer's position and compensates for his shadow on the image, or tracks his eye movement to adjust the portion of the image being viewed in some meaningful way, creating a more interactive viewing experience. To be clear, my question is not primarily about what kind of technologies we can expect, but how those technologies could change the art form, not only directly, but philosophically.

Hi John,

I agree about the history of technical quality, but I think the definition of "perfection" evolves with the medium. The medium has always been defined as a printed form, but that has changed. As I suggested to Rick above, I think display technology will perhaps be more influential in the evolution of the medium than the capture technology, if the two can be separated, at all.

Imagine an image could recognize you, and adjust itself to your personal preferences, or engage you in some personally meaningful way. This potential has never existed with any art from in history, but it does now. Imagine the implications!

Red,

My point was that you seem to be asking about those interested in looking to the future however in my mind the terms forward thinking or foreward looking implies, regardless if intended or not, judgemental wording.

I'm guessing it's not my wording that offends you, but the question itself. How would you have worded my question to eliminate any potential negative connotations? To reiterate, it's not the technology itself that I'm interested in as much as the artistic implications of the technology. I could assume that since LF photographers by definition are committed to a mature technology, they aren't as likely to be looking at new technological developments, but I think that's an unwarranted assumption. Many LF photographers digitize their images for a variety of uses, and might be looking to take advantage of emerging technologies, or to explore emerging ideas to incorporate into their work, while others might be primarily concerned with perfecting their current processes, and/or developing existing ideas. That I'm more interested in discussing the former shouldn't imply I have no respect for the latter.

Paul,

I'm always happy to read your insightful comments. I put photography in the larger context of visual arts, regarding evolution. I see photography in the visual arts as analogous to the printing press in literature; a paradigm shift introducing the machine into a previously human-only endeavor, removing many human limitations, with medium-changing consequences. I think we're facing a new paradigm shift in introducing machine intelligence into a previously human-intelligence-only endeavor, with even greater consequences to the medium. Photography, as historically defined, might not survive the shift.

Thank you all for a very interesting discussion, and I look forward to more of it.

Doug Howk

27-Nov-2011, 16:51

Jay, I don't expect AI and UI efforts to be invested in display of still images. Most of that effort will be in fully immersive experiences, eg video games. In fact I don't see much of a future for still images in a digital world. Most of the snapshot boom with cell phones will be replaced with audio/video (maybe even 3-D).

Is there a future for still images? Since technology enables (or will enable) anyone to capture/display detail and tonal range to levels of perfection never possible before, then the value of those attributes will become negligible. What will remain is traditional photography minus the expectations of progress, except possibly within a circumscribed methodology. We may learn better ways of creating a platinum print, for example; but we'll quit looking for a replacement technology for platinum printing.

paulr

27-Nov-2011, 17:13

Dominik, you have in no way offended me, please, no need to apologize for anything. I'm sorry if I took a tone of offense!

I think that in order to unpack these ideas we need to look more closely at the philosophical divides between modernism and postmodernism. This is a very broad topic, with a lot of proven opportunity for disagreement, so I won't assume that everyone's on board with the exact same definitions and divides between historical periods.

I do believe, however, that we can reach an agreement that something fundamental shifted between the work of August Sander and the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Sander is a great example of the European flavor of Modernism from the early to mid 20th Century. His work suggests that he believed in form, and in the truth of appearances, and in a kind of optimism toward Modernity. His apparent belief in the nobility of the individual can seem Romantic from our perspective, but it was common in early Modern work, tempered perhaps by the newness and austerity of the Modern style (and by the defiance implied by doing this work in the face of Nazism). Sander once said, "We know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled."

Implicit in this is not just a belief in psychology but a belief in identity. You may reasonably ask, "who doesn't believe in psychology or in identity," but the period following Sander was defined by a questioning of these and many of the other defining ideas of the Grand Narrative of Modernism. The postmodern movement, in fact, could be seen as a questioning of the possibility of a grand narrative.

The Bechers, as I see them, were not hardcore postmodernists in that only part of their endeavor was deconstructive. They had one food soldly in the pre-war modernism of Sander and Patzsch and Coburn ... this is most evident when you look at the individual, classically printed images. But when you look at the work as presented, in grids, you see something else is going on. The de-humanized uniformity of the vision has and effect of putting the whole endeavor in quotation marks. We're not just looking at a bunch of different water towers, but at a typology of industrial architecture, and at the uniformity of the esthetics of the architecture. We're also looking at the particular way of seeing that informed all the images and showed them identically. Frontal, cool, centered objectivism could itself be seen as the subject matter.

Part of the result is a kind of layering of possible meaning—a fundamental ambiguity as to what the work is "about." Can it be about the world in the way that Sander's work was? I think so a little bit, but we can't stop there. It's also about the assumptions behind Sander's work—a kind of examination that can be seen as a celebration or a questioning, or possibly both.

Very broadly speaking, this is the kind of exploration that postmodern work deals with. At its best, as with the Becher's, there are many layers present to appreciate. At its worst (Sherry Levine, maybe?) It gives us one liners that try to undermine ideas that we've already seen undermined more imaginatively. But good or bad, the work from the 70s onward tended to question principles that undergirded earlier work, even while incorporating many of those same principles. Hence Derrida's observation that a text is what deconstructs itself.

All this is to say that in spite of many of the similarities between early modern work and late modern and postmodern work, there are deep-seated differences. And I think we will see such differences in what comes next. In fact, I think change is already well under way. I'm embarassed to say I don't have examples of it in photgraphy, because I haven't been looking at much new work. But I see it in fiction and poetry, in painting, in theater, and movies. for some examples and analysis, here's (http://www.metamodernism.com/) an interesting site that comments on current trends in arts and culture. Please forgive the terrible coinage of "metamodernism." They mean meta in the sense of the Greek metaxy, which means to oscillate between extremes.

August Sander and the Becher's were part of the Neue Sachlichkeit, Gursky and most of the currently famous german modern photographers were Becher pupils. Neue Sachlichkeit (1920's) = Aesthetic and philosophical view. Ansel Adams was a damn good photographer but as has been stated numerous times by photo historian basically a 19th century landscape photographer. The new topographic movement and a lot of today's Landscape guys have a lot in common not only in terms of visual aesthetics but also in terms of the message they wanted to convey. Photography as an art form certainly has evolved in that your right but not necesseraly in the context of the art world, where most philosophical views are nothing but bull.... There are of course some exceptions but not too many

rdenney

27-Nov-2011, 21:48

Regarding the limitations of digital displays, I think you're unreasonably pessimistic. That technology is advancing exponentially, and it won't be long before digital displays of any size surpass printed images, and more closely resemble a transparency on a light table than an image on a current technology display.

No doubt. But that's not what I meant. People show their pictures to other people on their iPhones--maybe on an iPad. Or they put them on the web. Sure, monitors for web display will get bigger and sharper, but they won't fit in people's pockets.

But it seems to me that sharpness and the sense of endlessly scalable detail that most of us think is inherent in large-format work may not be the target quality markers in software-driven displays, even displays of high resolution. They will simulate sharpness using algorithmic enhancement, and they will favor bright and dramatic colors and tones, which are what those sorts of back-lit displays do well (as is the case with transparencies on a light table). Few people ever looked at transparencies on a light table. Most regular people had postcard-size prints. Thus, more and more I think art will favor presentations that read well without needing large sizes and endless detail. "Favor" does not mean that alternatives are eliminated, of course. There are many examples of people seeking endless detail even with small cameras (Gigapan is an example). But I think those are at the fringes and will not dominate the photography that most people, especially regular people who do not identify themselves as photographers, might experience and prefer.

I also think that digital manipulations will provide new tools that are waiting for artists who can use them to revolutionary effect. Currently, most of those tools seem to still be used to simulate some other medium (even traditional photography).

I compare this to other art forms that are also dependent on their apparatus. A fine cabinet maker might achieve high art with his craft, and only an expert would really know if he used power tools and sandpaper and knocked it out in an afternoon or scrapers and hand tools and spent months. Musicians find themselves competing not with prior artists of their instruments, but with digital replacements for their instruments, both in commercial and aesthetic terms. As technology eliminates the difficulty of craft, the importance of craft in the art becomes important only to those who worship craft--and that includes both artists and their admirers. But most regular people remain blissfully unaware and unappreciative of such anachronistic displays of craft.

I'm not talking about the art intellegentsia--I'll leave that to Paul's far superior knowledge and explanation. I'm talking about what unsophisticated receivers of art seem to be using to view art these days.

We can kick the dirt if we want, but that's how I see it.

I specifically aim much of my photography at the past, even when I use the latest tools, simply because that's the best I'm able to understand. I don't much care if it's not relevant, even though I'd really like to put my finger on what might make it relevant just as a matter of intellectual curiosity. I'm generally stuck with making the same sorts of images, mostly that revere (possibly as a matter of worship) beautiful places and things, that artists have always made. The new tools just make it easier. But someone will come along that will take those tools and blow art away. When they do, I probably won't understand it. But lots of regular people will also not get it, so maybe we'll have a place for a quite a while. There is no way to describe that as the future of anything, however.

Rick "days of future past" Denney

jcoldslabs

27-Nov-2011, 23:10

The established order is always threatened when a new technology democratizes what had previously been the domain of specialists.

If a person not schooled or practiced in the art of photography can take a snapshot with a cell phone camera and then automatically apply a filter that desaturates it, creates an algorithmically defined tilt/swing effect and adds an authentic-looking Polaroid type 55 border to the image, what does this say about my efforts in the field with my large format camera, my years of experience and my dwindling cache of type 55 film? It says nothing except that the aforementioned person and I have made different choices to achieve a similar result. If that end result is all I am interested in then this advance in technology is threatening, but if the process by which the photo is made is the goal, I have nothing to worry about. (Whether either one of us is making art, that is another matter.)

Case in point: the photo attached to this post. I shot that last night, of my wife in bed. I set up the Speed Graphic on a tripod, maneuvered it into our tiny bedroom, focused carefully, exposed a sheet of T-Max 100, processed it in the bathroom, let it dry and then scanned it. I could have just snapped a digital photo of the exact same scene and saved hours of trouble. Why didn't I? Because for me (and possibly *only* for me) it wouldn't have been the same. The photo is not high art, closer to a snapshot, but the process of making and processing the image the way I did was the bulk of the point.

The question of whether or not large format photographers in particular are more or less inclined to look to the future of the medium is curious to me because--since the advent of smaller cameras--we have been on the fringes of the photographic mainstream (as a simple percentage of all people using cameras). Those for whom photography was simply a way to record life around them are those who threw over their sheet film cameras for vest pocket Kodaks a century ago and today are the people who shoot only with their cell phone cameras because of the convenience. People who choose to use large format cameras do so for all kinds of reasons, but convenience and ease-of-use are not among them.

Jonathan

Brian C. Miller

28-Nov-2011, 00:04

I think we're facing a new paradigm shift in introducing machine intelligence into a previously human-intelligence-only endeavor, with even greater consequences to the medium. Photography, as historically defined, might not survive the shift.

Imagine for a moment that new technology gives essentially infinite resolution. You can even pan around the image to a degree. Objects are analyzed to become 3D wire frames, and these can be moved about at will. The sun or moon can be accurately moved around, and all the shadows are just fine.

Let us suppose that a camera has been invented like that described in the late 1800s: a self-mobile device that goes around and photographs images according to a set of criteria. Maybe it can even reliably catch "the decisive moment."

So: what next?

"Ralph Steiner, the late, great photographer, would occasionally write me a funny, provocative letter after he had read one of my published articles. He would end with the words: 'But you still have not told me in which direction to point the camera -- and this is what matters.' And he is right."
-- Bill Jay, On Being a Photographer, p. 31, "Selecting a Subject" (emphasis added)

This is the true human element of photography. Where to point the camera? What is supposed to go in front of that lens? That is the decision that we, people, make every time we pick up the camera. When the choice is left to a machine's programming, we are relying on the expertise of programmers and engineers we have never met. How about their marketing focus groups? They'll have a say in what the machine does, as well. How about political and legal influence? Will that machine-camera photograph what you want? Maybe it will think that your Weston-wannabe-pepper is porn, and it will report you straight away.

So the AI-camera of the future will make photographs without your intervention, according to criteria, and report to the state. Feel good about that now?

How about viewing photographs injected directly into your mind? What does that really mean for the individual?
It means that someone outside of you can control you as easily as changing channels on a television set. Are you happy with that? "We control the horizontal. We control the vertical." Does that make you feel warm and fuzzy? How about if someone injects psychotically horrific images into your mind, giving you a full-time sensory immersion of Hieronymus Bosch's hell? Tools which can be used for evil, will be used for evil. There's well over one million viruses out there for Windows. What kind of mind interface would be truly impervious?

In Shirow Masamune's Ghost in the Shell, cyborg interfaces are ubiquitous, and people's minds get hacked on a rather regular basis. How much has this future's art progressed? Same stuff, different day.

I looked at August Sander. He went around on his bicycle, photographing people. Person, aim camera, click. Again and again. Much like many other people who have photographed people, before, after, and currently.

So what will photography be like in the future? Like it was in the 1800s, 1900s, 2000s, I suppose it will be quite similar later on. Just like the advance of painting.

Jay DeFehr

28-Nov-2011, 03:54

Rick,

I think we're having two different conversations. I mean to discuss photography as an art form, not as a means of documentation and sharing among family and friends. It's not that I'm not interested in those uses, it's just not what I mean to discuss here.

But it seems to me that sharpness and the sense of endlessly scalable detail that most of us think is inherent in large-format work may not be the target quality markers in software-driven displays, even displays of high resolution. They will simulate sharpness using algorithmic enhancement, and they will favor bright and dramatic colors and tones, which are what those sorts of back-lit displays do well (as is the case with transparencies on a light table). Few people ever looked at transparencies on a light table. Most regular people had postcard-size prints. Thus, more and more I think art will favor presentations that read well without needing large sizes and endless detail

I'm not so sure. There is a lot of work being done to develop thin, flexible, cheap, high resolution displays that read as well in sunlight as a photographic print does for applications as large as reprogrammable wallpaper and billboards; it's a primary design goal for several companies and countless institutions and individuals are working on supporting technologies. It looks to be a question of when, rather than if.

Thanks for your thoughts, as always.

Brian,

Your paranoid vision of the future hasn't played out yet, though we already have robot photographers that make photos without human intervention and report directly to state agencies, and machine intelligence has been a part of photography since the advent of the exposure meter; even the extinction type is a form of machine intelligence, to say nothing of today's eye-tracking auto-everything wonder machines, so you should be quite comfortable with the concept by now. Machine intelligence is inevitable and becoming ubiquitous. Every technological advance has been met with resistance by some faction of the population, (Church, luddites, Unabomber, etc.), and some have managed to slow progress, but none have been able to stop or reverse it for long. Creating technology is what our species does and we can't decide to stop evolving. I'm sorry the world is such a scary place for you.

redrockcoulee

28-Nov-2011, 05:58

Jay

No you are incorrect, it was not the question that I was responding to. I thought I had explained that, if not I doubt I can do any better.

Jay DeFehr

28-Nov-2011, 08:30

Jay

No you are incorrect, it was not the question that I was responding to. I thought I had explained that, if not I doubt I can do any better.

Fair enough. I thought if you could rephrase my question in a non-loaded/offensive way I might learn by example.

rdenney

28-Nov-2011, 12:40

MDR

28-Nov-2011, 12:57

redrockcoulee

28-Nov-2011, 14:54

Jay

It is the last two sentences that I responded to, a more simpler 'future or futuralist (I think that is what they are called) terms etc.

As far as the answer goes, I do not know or even pretend to be able to guess what the future has in store. But I think that percentage wise this forum might actually be a good place to answer this question as there seems a higher ratio of experinced and matured as in being involved not in age, than in other forums I visit. I am certainly not including myself in this list, unless it is the age thing. Ethics, history, philosoply and asthetics about photography seem to more common topics here than at a couple of the other forums I either frequent or lurker.

The only future I think I was at least bit accurate was a couple of years ago I said that the film/digital debate will go the way of the road/mountain bike debate of the 80s, more or less disapear to be of little interest to most people. I think that in the future there will be actually more diversity rather than less in the directions that photographers can strike out in techniques and in mediums. Traditional film staying around, old ones continuing to be revised, digital offering even more variety and not speaking in terms of camera types, photography and video becoming more intertwined and some aspects of photography becoming common place that are not even here today, or maybe it is more of image taking as some of it will be capturing images as simply for transmitting info/data. In some ways it will be more like transportation, everyone needs it and a few use professionally and many amateurs that are really good. We don't all drive rally cars or cycle to work but we all move around. Photography will be more like that, we all do it but in what ways works for us but I do not see the art of it disappearing.

In schools or styles, it is aways evolving and the future will not only see that continue but to expand. In the future some of what is today's leading edge will be considered old fashion but some will continue shooting that way as will LF shooters. The future is most likley larger and will take a shape that few if any would guess accurately. As the Byrds song says "The future's ahead" (I want to grow up and be a politician. Think it was the Farther Along album or maybe Byrdmania)

paulr

28-Nov-2011, 15:52

Paul my examples were meant for how photographs looks (Aesthetics), that the discussion and partly the reception of photography and photographers has changed is clear and I full agree with you but for me photography is a visual aesthetic form of art and the arttalk is less interesting to me, because I often (not always) consider it to be meaningless. Unfortunately I know too many artist (studied art for 4 years) that talk a lot but have in fact very little to say, or produce mediocre work and try to elvate it by talking in artbabble.

Dominik, if what I said sounds like babble, please tell me which parts weren't clear.

I'm not really sure what you mean by art talk; that's what we're doing here: talking about art. If you just want to talk about how things look on the surface that's fine, but I'm not sure why the future of surface esthetics is a terribly interesting topic. I don't know how to have a meaningful discussion of the cover without also talking about the book.

paulr

28-Nov-2011, 16:03

Jay, I'm not sure there is much of a distinction between art photography and the photography normal people do to document their memories. My point was that distinction used to hinge on technical proficiency, but that is no longer the case. There has been a recent move towards enormous prints which may be a way to reinforce that diminishing distinction.

Sure, technical proficiency means less and less as the tools get easier and more accessible. But that's only one difference between art and commerce or art and personal scrapbook. The differences are in what we ask of it. There can be overlap, of course, but the typical snapshot is required to mean something to the person who took it, and to others who know the subject ... it's married to the context from which it came. Pull it out of that context and it just becomes a type; it loses its specific interest until it becomes some kind of cultural or historical document. Exceptions to this are always interesting, but they are interesting because they are exceptional.

That Cindy Sherman photo we spent so much time discussing a while back would look like a snapshot to many, including many photographers. I suspect many artists don't distinguish naive uses and purposed art photography the way we crafticians might.

Ok, but let's look at this seriously. Sherman plays on a snapshot esthetic, but it's obvious to anyone that it's not a snapshot. First of all, we know that it's staged, and that subject of the picture is playing a role, and the subject is in fact the artist. It's a case of someone using the snapshot as a trope in order to comment on it (go back to my ramblings on the postmodern a few posts back). This is much like a filmmaker using shaky, grainy, hand-held shots to convey a sense of a home movie, within the context of a feature-length narrative. It's a reference to that particular way of looking.

Other differences: the Sherman picture is printed large. It's very carefully lit, styled, and art directed. And more significantly, it's part of an extensive series that is sequenced and edited in a way that's not at all like what you'd see in a scrapbook.

Which is another way of saying that there's more substance to art than the surface esthetic.

And before you all throw me off the island, no, I'm not a Cindy Sherman fan.

Jay DeFehr

28-Nov-2011, 16:21

Rick,

Any similarities between photography as an art form and photography as a casual recording medium are mostly superficial, despite appearances to the contrary. That the Sherman photo resembles a snapshot is not accidental, but the larger point is that Sherman's work is part of the discourse that constitutes the art form, while a casual snapshot is not, and I don't think technical proficiency has been a hinge point in that discourse for a very long time, any more than an author's typing skills are part of literary theory.

You might be right about any given artist's intentions and distinctions, but it's the art form at large I'm interested in here.

Technology is one aspect of the medium, and one most posters, myself included, have commented on here, but I'd hoped to see more comments about the ways changes in science, culture and philosophy might affect the art form. Surely a connected world thinks differently about a great many things than the one that preceded it. Will our children see themselves and each other differently than we see ourselves and each other? How will the issues they'll face as a species affect the way they picture their world? In a world of ubiquitous machine intelligence, how will this particular collaboration (photography) evolve? The technology directly related to imaging is only one very small part of the technological changes that are re-shaping the world and our species, revealing previously unknown mechanisms, and challenging long held beliefs. Will a person who sees himself as a cultural locus create the same kind of work as one who sees himself as special type of person (artist, genius, etc.)? Can the role of artist be maintained if free will is believed to be an untenable hypothesis?

Thank you for your thoughts.

Peter York

28-Nov-2011, 16:53

I spent Thanksgiving in Taos. A day trip brought me back to the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe. Their collection is very impressive, with a broad range of techniques and styles, though the post-modern seemed underrepresented.

The only unity I could find amongst the selection was that 1., each print had a "presence" to it that drew me in, and 2., each photographer was able to repeatedly achieve that "presence" in a body of work. I believe this is and has always been the essence of photography as an art form, irregardless of aesthetics, process and technique.

However, Rick's comments now have me wondering if the print itself will continue to be the basis for evaluating a photograph.

Brian C. Miller

28-Nov-2011, 16:57

Brian,

Your paranoid vision of the future hasn't played out yet, though we already have robot photographers that make photos without human intervention and report directly to state agencies, and machine intelligence has been a part of photography since the advent of the exposure meter; even the extinction type is a form of machine intelligence, to say nothing of today's eye-tracking auto-everything wonder machines, so you should be quite comfortable with the concept by now. Machine intelligence is inevitable and becoming ubiquitous. Every technological advance has been met with resistance by some faction of the population, (Church, luddites, Unabomber, etc.), and some have managed to slow progress, but none have been able to stop or reverse it for long. Creating technology is what our species does and we can't decide to stop evolving. I'm sorry the world is such a scary place for you.

Forewarned is forearmed. You are not paranoid when you know "they" are out to get you. I once put a honeypot on my DSL line for a couple of weeks, and I kept track of the statistics. There were between 500 to a bit over 1200 attacks per day, with the majority coming from fellow subscribers on my ISP. Every country in the world with an Internet connection was represented. At home I run behind a firewall and my computers have malware scanners. This is not paranoid, but simply good common sense.

To think that we will "evolve" without somebody being a total jerk is just plain hiding from the basic facts of human behavior. And, "you still have not told me in which direction to point the camera -- and this is what matters."

Technology enables different things to be photographed, but once this becomes commonplace, then the thrill is gone, and the question of advancement becomes a question of artistic talent. Machine "intelligence" will not replace this. As evidence, do we have a real AI? A real Turing prize winner? Even in games, what is considered as AI is just a set of algorithms. The "intelligence" of the camera AI still can only assist the photographer, not replace the photographer.

Jay DeFehr

28-Nov-2011, 17:38

Brian,

To be clear, I never used the term AI, you did. The term I use is machine intelligence, and I gave some examples. As for Turing prize winners, stay tuned. I think an interesting question regarding the Turing test is whether all people could pass it. I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.

In which direction you should point your camera is a meaningless question, however clever you might find it. One could just as meaninglessly ask, When should I press the shutter, or what lens should I use? Without context, the questions have no meaning, and so they don't matter at all.

We already have robot photographers, but as of now, no one is calling them artists. Expect that to change. We have robot painters' works exhibited in museums alongside human artists' works, and machine composers creating works good enough to fool experts, and of course, machine chess players good enough to beat the best human players. Why do you suppose photography is so exceptional in this regard?

clay harmon

28-Nov-2011, 17:50

Jay, it sounds like you are fishing for some commentary about the effect that changes in the wider world that we live in will have on photography as art. Is that a fair summary?

My not-very-organized sense of things is this: In a very broad sense, art photography has always been a half wavelength or so behind the painting world. Just as advances in sciences in the early 1900s were in a sense reductive and atomizing (quite literally!), the painting world began to explore the basic components of the form - from the early cubist endeavors on through the graphic simplicity of much of the very modernist painters. I think the best and most sensitive artists were able to pick up on these vibrations in the Weltanschauung and find a way of expressing their reaction to these changes.

Yet at the same moment that Picasso and Braque were engaging in their reductive exercises, the art photography was still working in the romantic world of the pictorialists. The modernism and exploration of photographic content for its own sake as practiced by Weston and others didn't come until about 20-30 years after the cubists had already had their fun.

But running counter to this atomization of the world during the 20th century, ever more profound advances in media from radio to television to (now) the internet have had the effect of connecting rather than atomizing the world. These technological advances have given rise to a culture of celebrity and popularity.

And this trend was picked up pretty quickly by Warhol and Lichtenstein in the Pop Art movement. But sure enough, about 20 years later along comes Cindy Sherman with her photographic take on the nature of celebrity and pop culture.

What I am getting at is that photography has always had this 'anxiety of influence' (yeah, go read some Harold Bloom) in its relationship with the traditional art world. In many ways, the photographic art that seems to have passed the test of some years all seems to be an echo to some degree of an earlier movement in the painting world, no matter how vehemently Edward Weston protests this notion in his Daybooks.

So if I were betting, I would say that in all likelihood, the art photography that will last will be something that in some way echoes the painting world of the recent past.

One thing that strikes me about painting world in the last 20-30 years is that technique seems to be back and in some cases even celebrated. Representational art is no longer necessarily a dirty word. And much of it seems to celebrate emotion, anomie, oddity, connection and the lack of connection.

I don't think that the ridiculous MFA project large color prints of slack jawed people standing around awkwardly in poorly lit rooms is going to be this echo. You can see that is what they are trying to do - especially the anomie and disconnection part. But in my opinion, a great deal of it has been hit with a very large stupid stick.

What would be interesting if there developed some movement in the photographic art world that just said 'screw it, I'm going on my own' and created some genre that truly was a reaction to the real world, and dealt with it on its own terms rather than being a reaction to what was happening in the painting world twenty years ago.

On the other hand, I could be full of shyte.

r.e.

28-Nov-2011, 18:02

One of the many things that is interesting about this thread is that Jay is actively curating it (to use the current jargon) and that it has not degenerated into the kind of slanging match that, given the subject, could well have ensued.

Jay DeFehr

29-Nov-2011, 04:42

Clay,

Thank you for your very thoughtful, and thought provoking comments. Bloom's "anxiety of influence" is a very interesting conceptual framework, and I think your application of it to the relationship between photography and painting is quite astute, though I tend to favor evolutionary psychology to Freudian.

Bloom's ideas about the nature of creativity resonate with me, and are along the lines of what I intended by my proposal of a person as a cultural locus as opposed to a discrete originator of creativity. I meant to suggest those two ways of understanding creativity more than to claim one is more valid than the other, and in fact, I believe a sort of duality exists by which a person is both a cultural locus- a role player in the work of the species- and a discrete originator of creativity, which is the mechanism for doing the work, much like the errors in copying the genetic code create mutations that interact with selection pressures to drive evolution.

Since painting and photography are both visual arts, they both draw from the same conceptual pool, and painting had a significant head start in its lineage, but I think the collaboration with the machine is closing that gap, and pointing towards a true divergence, fueled by the rapid evolution of the machine. I think photography, or whatever follows it, will be able to deal with concepts with which painting can't easily cope. It will be very interesting to see how things develop.

Thanks again for your very insightful comments.

Struan Gray

29-Nov-2011, 04:57

*I* am the future of photography. So there.

I'm only half joking. I am one future of photography - the one that accepts that still imaging is a mature art, stops trying to be new, new new, and simply uses photography as an established tool to communicate something I want to say. I want to use photography to drive my own perception and visual thinking forward, but I have very little interest in advancing it as an art.

FWIW, I don't think there are many stylistic or aesthetic innovations which have not been tried before. For the upper reaches of art-for-arts-sake creativity, that leaves technical innovation as the only mechanism for change. Which is cool, because it completes the circle back to the vernacular, grubby world of mass-market consumption.

I agree with those who see digital as having democratised the established metrics of quality. Thank God for that. It's worth noting that 'digital' encompasses the capture medium, as well as the clever chips and algorithms which run the imaging device and control the presentation medium.

That said, a large piece of paper or MDF with coloured materials stuck to it makes continuing sense as a way of presenting single static images of any size.

Where digital has made a quiet revolution is in the power of combined images. Averaged shots, combination portraits, long exposures and collage are nothing new, but the ease and scope of digital versions has, for me, produced a quantitative change significant enough to be qualitative too.

I am also struck by how often visiting a contemporary art museum is like visiting a science centre with my kids. It's not just that both nowadays seem more concerned with entertaining and inducing emotions rather than engendering thought. Nor is it the trivial fact that the designers of both sorts of experience know of each others' work. There is a unity of feel that suggests such institutions act as a kind of authority of cool - they are the gatekeepers who decide which options outside the core curriculum of our lives should be worth giving status to.

I personally am very resistant to the idea that a canon (which is inevitable) should do more than inform my own aesthetic responses to the world. I miss the sense of discovery, of serendipidity, you get in classical art galleries.

A prediction? Interactive art will take off. If only as a comment on the surveillance society and a way of sidestepping the ghastly dullness of video installations. Works which respond to the number, mood and activity of visitors will become increasingly common. This could be as simple as pseudo-sculpture that tracks viewers' head movements and simulates a 3D scene on a display. It could be as complex as sound sculptures which incorporate, solera style, the auditory history of viewers' responses. For photography, I can think of many, many fun things you could do with a fast-refreshing display and a mix of viewer-sensors and recognition software.

But there is always still room for one more sonnet, or song in C-major, or archivally-processed black and white fibre print.

Brian C. Miller

29-Nov-2011, 10:00

In which direction you should point your camera is a meaningless question, however clever you might find it. One could just as meaninglessly ask, When should I press the shutter, or what lens should I use? Without context, the questions have no meaning, and so they don't matter at all.

Nope! That is the essential question of photography. Cameras photograph a subject. That is what cameras do. No more, no less. Today you will think, "what shall I write?" and then you will write it. The same with the camera. You, and every photographer, will pose to yourself the question, "what should my subject be?" The selection of the subject is the very basis of photography. Without a subject, photography becomes meaningless. Therefore, "where do I point the camera" is a photographer's greatest question.

We already have robot photographers, but as of now, no one is calling them artists.

Nope! Name one robot that is used to independently photograph a wedding.

You use the phrase "machine intelligence" but what is really needed is "artificial intelligence." You claim that "machine intelligence" is an exposure meter. That is not intelligence. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines intelligence as "the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations." An exposure meter is not intelligent. Neural networks and genetic algorithms are parts of artificial intelligence. A "45 Point AF System" and "63-zone metering system" in a camera do not denote intelligence. These are parts of a tool, and the tool does not answer the question of where to point the camera.

Phrases that you formulate come back and haunt you. I shouldn’t have formulated “the School of Resentment.” I once called them a “rabblement of lemmings,” and I run into that phrase everywhere. And I now wish that I hadn’t formulated the single phrase that I seem to have given to the language: “the anxiety of influence.” Of course everybody misunderstands it.
...
It’s actually the relationship between one poem and another poem, one novel and another novel, and so on and so forth.
Harold Bloom, interview by Jesse Pearson (http://www.vice.com/read/harold-bloom-431-v15n12)
(emphasis added)
Can we photograph without "the anxiety of influence?" Can we create photographs without relationship? Of course the word "anxiety" isn't a good term for the phrase. Does another photographer's work create anxiety? That's a question you'll have to answer for yourself. Me, I usually think to myself, "I can do that." And that's what Arthur Fellig said: "Anybody can do what I do."

clay harmon

29-Nov-2011, 11:08

I agree that his phrase is maybe not the best formulation. But he wrote it and now we gotta live with it. Like many concepts, it really only puts a name to something we already inherently understand.

My understanding of his meaning is that nothing is created in a vacuum. Everything an artist makes is inevitably composed in the presence of observations and influences he/she may have had up to that point. And because creativity is a constant struggle for originality despite these influences, there will be evidence of this struggle in the completed work.

Now I'm gonna go make some pictures

(emphasis added)
Can we photograph without "the anxiety of influence?" Can we create photographs without relationship? Of course the word "anxiety" isn't a good term for the phrase. Does another photographer's work create anxiety? That's a question you'll have to answer for yourself. Me, I usually think to myself, "I can do that." And that's what Arthur Fellig said: "Anybody can do what I do."

Struan Gray

29-Nov-2011, 12:08

Name one robot that is used to independently photograph a wedding.

Me sir! Me Sir! Oh! Oh! me sir!

Google streetview (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7593134/Wedding-pictured-on-Google-Street-View.html).

PS: serious point: the essence of photography is selection. For me, and I suspect the art world, it does not matter much whether the selection is made at the position and moment that the light is captured, or later on browsing an image database or collection of discarded snapshots.

Heroique

29-Nov-2011, 14:17

If only I were a Chaucer of photography. No anxieties of influence. :^)

Struan: Serious pop quiz. You’ve said where your selection is made, but what motivates it? Three sentences or less.

Struan Gray

29-Nov-2011, 14:37

Significance, curiosity, aesthetics or convention.

My personal pantheon tends to be populated by artists, scientists, flaneurs etc who are able to define their own definitions of significance and then communicate them to others in a convincing way.

You got off lightly: I am a master of the rambling sub-clause.

Heroique

29-Nov-2011, 14:57

Mr. Gray, your paper gets an A this time – but next time, I will expect you to remember Paul’s recurring point about the cross-purposes between the artist’s intent & what his work actually communicates.

jcoldslabs

29-Nov-2011, 15:12

In regard to robot photographers and where to point the camera, there is this:

http://tinyurl.com/bouugcl

Which makes me think that photo editing will become the photographic skill du jour in the future. More and more of photographic "vision" will be pushed forward into the post-processing phase. If everyone were somehow embedded with a high-resolution "street view" camera that recorded his or her daily life, it would be up to someone to edit this massive data stream down to its best, most aesthetically pleasing components for viewing, either as still images or video streams. Those choices, choices that historically were made in camera at the moment of exposure, will now be put off until later in the process thus opening up all kinds of possibilities and new conundrums.

If the camera points everywhere then where to point the camera is no longer a question. But the implied artistic choice of where to point the camera--perhaps the essence of the human photographer's artistry--will carry on in the selection of a final image or stream from the data pile. It seems that Adams' notion of "pre-visualization" would no longer apply since just about every aspect of an image (framing, cropping, local contrast, tonality, dynamic range, selective focus) could be adjusted after the fact without need for anticipatory refinements.

Imagine Cartier-Bresson or Salgado sorting through vast continuous streams of daily recorded material from their travels. Their vision, their "eye", would still come through in which images they selected from the continuum just as it always did, only now well after the fact instead of at the moment of exposure.

So what happens when you pair Google's street view images with this software:

http://tinyurl.com/cyeva48

EDIT: Didn't see Struan's PS until after I'd posted. I'm in agreement; I'm just more wordy is all.

Mike Anderson

29-Nov-2011, 16:16

...
So what happens when you pair Google's street view images with this software:

http://tinyurl.com/cyeva48

....

For a while I've thought the billions of photos online could be used to help train a system in aesthetics of sorts (AA for Artificial Aesthetics?). If the time interval between when an image is requested by an internet address and when something else is requested by same address (the big assumption being a person is looking at the image until the 2nd request, which indicates the person wants to look at something else), then an image could have associated with it an interest metric, which is the collection of time lengths that that image has been "up".

Then you feed this massive data set (image->interest metric) into some pattern-matching-learning-system (neural net based or whatever the latest thing is) and after a while you'll have a system that can judge images according the interests and aesthetics of Facebook users as a whole.

The next step is develop a system to show me only pictures that I like so I don't have to waste my time looking at pictures that don't have Justin Bieber in them.

...Mike

Jay DeFehr

29-Nov-2011, 19:39

Struan,

You've made many excellent points; thanks for taking the time. Perhaps we needed reminding that the medium allows for an evolution unrelated to its technological evolution, and that changes in the world/ new perspectives can be expressed through the medium as it currently exists.

I think your predictions are playing out, even as we speak, and will evolve in unanticipated ways.

Brian,

I think our conversation has drifted too far off topic to sustain my interest. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Struan, jcoldslabs, and Mike,

Very interesting points regarding selection, editing, and filtering, and how much, or how little difference it makes whether these actions, in addition to the act of image capture, are performed by people or by machines, or some collaboration of the two. The possibilities are truly fascinating. I know of one show of images by a well established photography gallery featuring images culled from google earth. This certainly seems to me evidence of an evolution of the traditional photographic collaboration of man and machine. I know some find this development startling, and perhaps even illegitimate, but for me, it seems in some ways much like an externalization of the internal human imaging process. If we accept the mind/body duality as something like a mechanical/mental duality, it's not such a stretch to see a machine/person duality as anything more than an extension into the external world of a formerly internal process.

And to Heroique's point, I think we make a lot of assumptions about the source of an emotional reaction to an image. Is it communication, or just stimulus response?

Lots to think about. Thank you all so much.

paulr

29-Nov-2011, 23:39

I am one future of photography - the one that accepts that still imaging is a mature art ... FWIW, I don't think there are many stylistic or aesthetic innovations which have not been tried before

Struan, this is the rare proposition of yours that I don't buy. Artists working in forms older than photography continue to innovate ... the novel, theater, poetry ...

Innovation doesn't have to be radical. It can be a new combination of elements, or an evolution of how form meets content, or of how technology meets idea.

I don't think that inovation is somehow required. People who chase it for its own sake usually end up with mere novelty, which risks obsolescence on delivery. But I think inovation is a natural byproduct having ones eyes and mind open in a changing world.

Struan Gray

30-Nov-2011, 14:24

Struan, this is the rare proposition of yours that I don't buy. Artists working in forms older than photography continue to innovate ... the novel, theater, poetry ...

Not much to disagree on really. I wasn't saying innovation within the medium was impossible, just that it wasn't of any great interest to me. Or, rather, the innovation I am looking for is one of content rather than form. I mostly read non-fiction these days, and it is striking how little the essay has changed over it's few hundred years of existence, certainly when compared to poetry or drama. I am similarly drawn to photographic non-fiction, which I see as making photographs which aim to be more than just an aesthetic object.

For me there are two huge downsides to automated imaging and data mining after the fact. First, robots are not good at serendipity, and algorithms don't do a good job of making conceptual connections. Both are central to much photography. With automated data capture you are almost always firmly in the grip of confirmation bias.

Second, a related issue: the touristification of experience. Collaboration, crowd-sourcing, and wiki-style knowledge pooling all ossify conventional wisdom. That can be a good thing, but it leaves a lot of blanks on the map, and rather than seeing them as an exciting source of new experience, they are labelled as worthless and not bothering with. Relying on aggregator tools, or allowing them to judge whether or not your project is a success, regresses inevitably and irreversibly to the mean.

The end result is that any surprises are just the surprises you expect to see. Contentment rather than pleasure.

Brian C. Miller

30-Nov-2011, 14:58

So what happens when you pair Google's street view images with this software:

http://tinyurl.com/cyeva48

What you get is this:

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
-- Zager and Evans

So the real future of photography is that technological developments will conspire to turn everyone into consumers, not creators. Everything will be fed to you. You will not have a say because you do not need to have a say. "Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend."

*I* am the future of photography. So there.

I'm only half joking. I am one future of photography - the one that accepts that still imaging is a mature art, stops trying to be new, new new, and simply uses photography as an established tool to communicate something I want to say.

Everyone who photographs is the future of photography. So, yes, you are the future of photography. So am I. So is Clay "Now I'm gonna go make some pictures" Harmon. And who else is the future of photography? Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, William Wegman, Anne Geddes, Peter Lik, and lots of other people.

I agree with those who see digital as having democratised the established metrics of quality. Thank God for that. It's worth noting that 'digital' encompasses the capture medium, as well as the clever chips and algorithms which run the imaging device and control the presentation medium.

PetaPixel: CNN Lays Off Photojournalists, Citing the Accessibility of Quality Cameras (http://www.petapixel.com/2011/11/29/cnn-lays-off-photojournalists-citing-the-accessibility-of-quality-cameras/).
Since digital automation has improved focus and exposure to the point that most people don't even know what it is, images can be uploaded from around the globe, and 16Mp cameras are under $100, why bother with professionals? This is life, and we shall change. This is part of the future of photography.

PS: serious point: the essence of photography is selection. For me, and I suspect the art world, it does not matter much whether the selection is made at the position and moment that the light is captured, or later on browsing an image database or collection of discarded snapshots.

Right, where to point the lens. Or for the other case, it's where the lens has been pointed. For the "art world" at large, it's all editing. They are consumers. They don't produce, and subsequently their entire focus is on consumption. But once an algorithm is applied to preselect the pictures, then there is no more editing. It has become the worst form of mass mindless consumption.

But is that the future of photography? Photographers are the main shapers of the future of photography. The photographer is the one who clicks the shutter. It is up to us to point the lens at something meaningful, click the shutter, and shape the future.

paulr

30-Nov-2011, 15:11

I am similarly drawn to photographic non-fiction, which I see as making photographs which aim to be more than just an aesthetic object.

The two presuppositions lurking here: 1) fiction / "art" photographs are not more than just esthetic objects; 2) non-fiction is non-fiction.

Getting way off-topic, I know, but a thing I love about fiction and poetry: these are the forms of writing that do not pretend to signify a world unmediated by language.

Similarly, we can say that art photography is the form of photography that does not pretend to signify a world unmediated by the photographic process itslelf. In this one sense, it is more "true" than journalistic or documentary modes, which pretend to a much simpler, but realistically complex and conflicted, truth.

Collaboration, crowd-sourcing, and wiki-style knowledge pooling all ossify conventional wisdom.

This needs to be said more often.

Heroique

30-Nov-2011, 15:58

A thing I love about fiction and poetry: these are the forms of writing that do not pretend to signify a world unmediated by language.

Then you love that “O My Luve’s like a red, red rose” does pretend to signify a world mediated by language.

(Just a courtesy alert that the ArtSpeak meter has gone up a notch, but maybe not quite into the red.)

rdenney

30-Nov-2011, 16:18

Getting way off-topic, I know, but a thing I love about fiction and poetry: these are the forms of writing that do not pretend to signify a world unmediated by language.

Similarly, we can say that art photography is the form of photography that does not pretend to signify a world unmediated by the photographic process itslelf. In this one sense, it is more "true" than journalistic or documentary modes, which pretend to a much simpler, but realistically complex and conflicted, truth.

"...does NOT pretend to signify a world UNmediated by language." Hmmm. I'm trying to untangle the double-negative, and having trouble.

Are you saying that non-fiction uses language to mediate the world? Mediate means to reconcile differences (extremes), or to find the middle position. So, non-fiction uses language to reconcile the extremes in the world, as opposed to fiction not claiming to use language to reconcile extremes?

The sentence sounds profound, but I can't figure out what you mean by it.

Maybe you mean that non-fiction tries to explain, and is built on the assumption that explanation is possible. While fiction does not try to explain, and thus allows the possibility that explanation is not possible.

Rick "on the verge of learning something" Denney

Jay DeFehr

30-Nov-2011, 16:31

Struan,

Can you elaborate on "photographic non-fiction"? What do you mean by, "more than just an aesthetic object"? Are you stating a preference for more objective/documentary photographs, as opposed to more abstract or conceptual ones?

I don't follow your logic regarding automated imaging/editing. When a person makes a photo isn't he essentially selecting one view from many potential views presented? How is serendipity compromised by selecting from captured views as opposed to "free range" views, and how does selecting the latter view eliminate a confirmation bias?

Ironically, perhaps, the images made by robots are by definition objective, even random records of the non-fiction variety.

For me, each example of photographic imaging represents a point on the man/machine collaboration spectrum. A person making carefully staged photos with a manual camera is on a different point along the spectrum than an intersection camera photographing red light runners, and both are different than a photo booth making instant portraits, etc., but man and machine are inextricably bound by evolution. Any machine, however autonomous, can trace its lineage back to a person or persons, and through them back to the birth of the universe.

Jay DeFehr

30-Nov-2011, 16:58

Rick,

I'll take a stab at it. The poet/writer has an idea which is expressed by language, but that expression is an abstraction of the idea and not the idea itself. Poets and writers of fiction embrace this abstraction, while writers of non-fiction seek to express the information as directly as possible, and try to avoid the imprecision of language when possible, by using numerical and graphical data, etc. The analogy to photography goes similarly; fiction/art photographers embrace the abstraction of the process while "straight"/ non-fiction photographers pretend objectivity and a more 1:1 relationship between the subject and the image.

I hope I haven't mangled Paul's point too badly.

Heroique

30-Nov-2011, 17:21

paulr

30-Nov-2011, 17:43

Are you saying that non-fiction uses language to mediate the world? Mediate means to reconcile differences (extremes), or to find the middle position. So, non-fiction uses language to reconcile the extremes in the world, as opposed to fiction not claiming to use language to reconcile extremes?

I mean mediate in the sense of intervening in a non-neutral way. Checking the dictionary, I realize this is a more lit-theory use of the word than a conventional use, so I apologize for being jargony.

From the OED: 5. To be the intermediary or medium concerned in bringing about (a result) or conveying (a gift, etc.); pass., to be communicated or imparted mediately. Spec. in Psychol., to bring about (a result) by acting as a mediating agency between an idea, intention, etc., and its realization; to act as such a mediator.

What I'm trying to convey is that ALL language mediates the experience or the world it describes. You can not truly say the same thing two different ways; you are always saying somewhat different things. We cannot escape the deep influence of language when we use it. Fiction, and especially poetry, acknowledge this as both the failing and the power of language. In poetry especially it tends to be central.

Other kinds of writing battle the phenomenon, if they acknowledge it at all.

I'm not trying to dismiss non-fiction, or other types of writing that aspire to telling-it-like-it-is. But I'm always wary of the ultimate inability of language to be transparent and to let the truth ... whatever that may be ... simply speak.

Fiction and poetry avoid this tension and this disappointment because they've thrown in the towel. They let let language do what language does: its own thing. I feel a sense of relief reading these genres because I'm not struggling to see through a medium that's only able to pretend transparency. I'm not making constant calculations to distinguish what's in the world from what's on the page.

Obviously we need language that aspires to the state of non-fiction. We need history, law, news, etc. etc.. But we also need a sophisticated approach to reading it—to know that any written truth is a version of the truth, and that the language used is a creator and not just a passive vessel of this truth.

I think you can safely substitute "photography" for language in these last paragraphs.

Heroique

30-Nov-2011, 18:01

I’m always wary of the ultimate inability of language to be transparent and to let the truth ... whatever that may be ... simply speak.

Uh oh, should we be wary that the nature of language prohibits your excellent points from being transparent and speaking the truth?

Should we ask you to re-submit your post in rhyming verse?

;^)

Greg Blank

30-Nov-2011, 18:11

Engineers, some of them are the biggest of the BS'rs just look at how screwed up our road system is in parts of this country and you'll understand, without a need for words.
I worked for three years on a survey crew & saw plenty.

Well, I think that’s a noble stab! Maybe Paul will think so too. But I also think it’s natural for a professional engineer (such as yourself) to make claims about science that may border upon being, well, just a little extravagant. For while the language of science does try to be objective, it is itself an “abstraction” from experience – useful and far from unreal, but thin and bare and poorer (less than 1:1) than the world it analyzes.

paulr

30-Nov-2011, 18:27

Uh oh, should we be wary that the nature of language prohibits your excellent points from being transparent and speaking the truth?

Of course!

Should we ask you to re-submit your post in rhyming verse?

Only if you're a glutton for punishment.

paulr

30-Nov-2011, 18:35

Jay DeFehr

30-Nov-2011, 18:43

Well, I think that’s a great stab! Maybe Paul will think so too. But I also think it’s natural for a professional engineer (such as yourself) to make claims about science that may border upon being, well, just a little extravagant. For while the language of science does try to be objective, it is itself an “abstraction” from experience – useful and far from unreal, but thin and bare and poorer (less than 1:1) than the world it analyzes.

You're very generous. I'm not an engineer, professional or otherwise, but I do tend to think in scientific terms. I understand it's one thing to express something, and another to explain it. When it comes to explanatory power, science is the only game in town, though far from perfect or infallible. In fact, it is in the recognition by science of its fallibility, and its insistence that all knowledge is provisional and subject to revision that it's beauty lies.

Jay DeFehr

30-Nov-2011, 18:49

Heroique

30-Nov-2011, 18:51

You're very generous. I'm not an engineer, professional or otherwise, but I do tend to think in scientific terms...

(Whoops, my apologies, I remembered you were an oilfield worker from an old thread, and I just thought that automatically meant “engineer.” I think the technical flavor of many of your posts added to this perception.)

Jay DeFehr

30-Nov-2011, 19:24

(Whoops, my apologies, I remembered you were an oilfield worker from an old thread, and I just thought that automatically meant “engineer.” I think the technical flavor of many of your posts added to this perception.)

No offense taken. Engineers aren't all bad.;)

Heroique

30-Nov-2011, 20:10

The differences of opinion concern the nature of meaning itself, and certainly the mutable nature of meaning in language.

I’m reminded of many great cultural accomplishments by those who were aware of these differences of opinion – and considered them vitally important, if we can trust their letters and journals – but always set these differences aside long enough to “get down to work.”

Some of them – I’m thinking Nabokov right now – “got down to work” by playing with them.

Another – now I’m thinking William James – “got down to work” by being open to them in his lovably detached manner.

rdenney

1-Dec-2011, 03:29

No offense taken. Engineers aren't all bad.;)

Thank you!

Rick "who does, however, know some bad ones" Denney

rdenney

1-Dec-2011, 03:47

You guys were talking about scientific writing ... I think that and legal writing are interesting examples. In both fields, language often has to be worked and practically tortured to eliminate possibilities of misundersting. The ironic result is that often no one besides a specialist can understand it at all.

Even so there are abject failures, especially in law, which deals with ideas that are less concrete than the ones in science. We have distinct schools of constitutional interpretation, which are divided by the same hermeneutic principles that divide schools of scriptural interpretation and schools of literary interpretation. The differences of opinion concern the nature of meaning itself, and certainly the mutable nature of meaning in language.

The result is that two judges can have opposite interpretations of the same law, based entirely on their philosophical stances toward interpretation.

This all makes complete sense to me. I have no shortage of experience explaining technical things in words (it's a large part of what I do for a living), and I promote better writing of engineering processes through systems engineering techniques. But I put these in the category of risk reduction, not risk resolution, precisely because words are imperfect. We imperfectly understand the ideas we are trying to express, and we imperfectly express them.

From a technical perspective, we could say something similar by realizing that the modulation transfer function of the optical, capture, and display components of photography are always less than one. Thus, distortion of some sort is always introduced in the process. We indeed do play with that imperfection, often by exaggerating it. This is the problem faced by legal and scientific writing, which faces the same limitation.

But it applies at a conceptual level, too, and this is where I think the correlation to language is strongest. The more we try to eliminate those distortions, the more we rob the image of the potential to express an idea that sits above the merely visual and looks down on it. Most of us are trying to capture some emotional or intellectual (bowing to Struan) response that defies description using any medium. We are always trying to improve transparency, but that assumes we have a clear idea of what we are trying to express transparently. The MTF of that idea formation in our heads is always less than one, and we are never completely transparent.

Adams complained of sharp images of fuzzy concepts, and your point is that all concepts are fuzzy, and that all expressions make them more so.

So, technical advances relating to new photographic equipment reduce technical flaws, but in so doing apply a pastiche of truthiness that is at best a myth. Artists, on the other hand, rather than experiencing those technical flaws as accidents the way snapshooters do, exaggerate them for effect. (I'm generalizing flaws here to include any purposed intent to interpose a layer of affect on the effect, which is about as Artspeaky as I get.) Thus, Cindy Sherman's shapshot style is recognizable as a style, not as an accident, and largely because of the other things that she did and because of what we know about her, which brings in selectivity and editing.

(On prior point I'd like to respond to: Google's street view, or whatever, cannot have serendipity, because it imposes a standard time and set of conditions for making it's photographic survey. Photographers often take advantage, sometimes without prior planning, of non-standard times and conditions that Google would reject.)

Rick "who may have learned something he probably already knew" Denney

Jack Dahlgren

1-Dec-2011, 06:28

Well, I think that’s a noble stab! Maybe Paul will think so too. But I also think it’s natural for a professional engineer (such as yourself) to make claims about science that may border upon being, well, just a little extravagant. For while the language of science does try to be objective, it is itself an “abstraction” from experience – useful and far from unreal, but thin and bare and poorer (less than 1:1) than the world it analyzes.

I've personally found that good engineers are quite aware of the fact that the models they use are quite approximate and abstract and that there are limits to their use. They realize that things like safety factors of 50 and 100% make a mockery of any more than a couple of significant figures. The not so good engineers may take things a bit more literally - or should I say fictionally?

Jay DeFehr

1-Dec-2011, 08:00

Rick,

I think your writing is among the clearest I read here, despite your engineering handicap.;)

Regarding serendipity, how does planning rule it out? Don't photographers regularly plan their surveys, yet take advantage of serendipitous unplanned events during their planned survey? Couldn't one argue that since the google car has so little "in mind" about what it plans to photograph, that it leaves more room for serendipity? Put differently; doesn't leaving more to chance leave more room for happy accidents?

rdenney

1-Dec-2011, 12:37

Regarding serendipity, how does planning rule it out?

It doesn't, and I refuted your compliment to me by not being clear about that. I should have said that something like Google has different objectives when they plan their photography, while a photographer might have different objectives, or indeed no objectives at all, when undertaking their photography. Thus, a photographer might go out to spot planning one photo, and because of some happenstance end up with something serendipitous and much better. They are able to respond to that serendipity, because they can shift their objectives at a whim.

An automated system (even if run by humans) sticks to its standards.

A photographer might make serendipity more possible by planning to be there at times when such serendipity takes place. Thus, a photographer might seek out a "magic-hour" time when the lighting has the potential to achieve their dreams, but runs a high risk of not being right at all. If the lighting is right, the planning was successful and serendipity takes place; the photographer can capture it because he positioned himself to. An automated system would seek a lower-risk solution. Google probably prefers overcast middle periods of the day, for example.

Editing doesn't just occur in space. It also occurs in time. We don't just decide where to point the camera. We also decide when, and for how long, to push the button. Expecting that data to be collected comprehensively so that the only art is in the selection seems quite a reach to me. Even if it's technically possible someday, I'm not sure anyone would be motivated to do it.

Rick "whose photography is strongly inhibited by the most favorable times of the day being filled with other duties" Denney

Jay DeFehr

1-Dec-2011, 16:18

Rick,

My compliment stands, and I enjoy our discussions very much, iterative clarifications included.

I think we're using the term serendipity a little differently, which should come as no surprise, given its malleable definition. I'm using the term broadly, as a happy accident- some fortuitous and unplanned occurrence. If the google car happened to photograph Bigfoot, for instance, that would qualify as serendipitous, by my definition, because I don't think that particular photo was part of the car's (or it's programmer's) plan, and I think it would be fortuitous to have a photo of Bigfoot, so the photo would meet both criteria.

I'm not sure what you're arguing in the last bit about editing. It's already a fact that a person selected images from google street view, and will have a show at a respected NYC photography gallery, and the practice is gaining momentum.

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/01/13/theory-meets-art-jon-rafman/

The appeal seems to be rooted in the fact that the photos are made by robots, and any meaning found in them is serendipitous. Can we doubt the future will see more sophisticated robot photographers?

Greg Blank

1-Dec-2011, 18:08

No doubt, and How about robotic engineers to program them. Of course after they inilate the worthless human counter parts.

Jay DeFehr

1-Dec-2011, 19:27

Greg,

I think you're missing the part about the person selecting the images made by the robot. I think something like Mike Anderson's proposal for training a neural net to recognize what humans consider aesthetic is already practical, Struan's point about algorithms not being good at recognizing visual concepts holds for neural nets, too. I would think it would require something like human intelligence to recognize human visual concepts.

clay harmon

1-Dec-2011, 20:02

As far as I am aware, no one has programmed a computer to feel pleasure yet. Yet that is what the best art does to us meat computers. I'm just saying.

Greg,

I think you're missing the part about the person selecting the images made by the robot. I think something like Mike Anderson's proposal for training a neural net to recognize what humans consider aesthetic is already practical, Struan's point about algorithms not being good at recognizing visual concepts holds for neural nets, too. I would think it would require something like human intelligence to recognize human visual concepts.

Jay DeFehr

1-Dec-2011, 21:05

Hi Clay,

I agree machines haven't evolved to the level of emotion yet, but I'm not sure it's a prerequisite for recognizing/creating what inspires emotions in us. For instance:

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm

Cope's program creates music good enough to provoke an emotional response from people, and even good enough to fool experts, yet no one is claiming EMI experiences anything.

And something from the visual arts- not a photographer, but a painter:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html

If there was something like a Turing test for a machine's creations, I think the above would be contenders. Machines don't need to experience anything to pass as conscious, they just need to fake it well enough to fool us.

jcoldslabs

1-Dec-2011, 23:36

Years ago I had a professor talk about a scent study where people were blindfolded and then presented with certain smells and subsequently asked what they thought they were smelling. One of the scents was literally a guinea pig's rear end. Most people identified this smell as some kind of cheese. When told what it really was they were retroactively disgusted.

When we imagine a machine autonomously taking meaningful or serendipitous photographs we do so with the knowledge that these hypothetical photographs were taken by an automated system. Doesn't "knowing" this hypothetical fact introduce bias? What if we walked into a gallery full of Google "Street View" panoramas but were not told anything about the photos' provenance? Would we appreciate them more, or less? Is not the issue whether a photograph is a "good" one--however so defined--as opposed to when and why and where and how it was taken? An autonomous machine can take a [good/artistically valid/meaningful/serendipitous/revelatory] photograph as surely as a person can take a bad one. Human exceptionalism is a difficult concept to unyoke oneself from. An army of robots taking award-winning photographs does not detract one iota from my own enjoyment of the craft or my motivation to forge ahead. If it did I would say it's time to change hobbies.

Jonathan

paulr

2-Dec-2011, 06:06

Greg,

Struan's point about algorithms not being good at recognizing visual concepts holds for neural nets, too. I would think it would require something like human intelligence to recognize human visual concepts.

Algorithms already do remarkable jobs of incorporating human esthetic ideas. Over ten years ago someone wrote a program that writes fugues in the style of Bach. It fools many non-Bach scholars. There's also a program that paints pretty convincing late Mondrians.

The issue here is that the machiness aren't innovating. They're following instructions based on an analysis of a pre-existing style. As with humans who work this way, there will be the occasional remarkable result. But you probably won't see the emergence of the next Bach, or the next Mondrian ... a machine that has a vision that requires a new mode of expression, a new algorithm. You'll just get efficent execution of the visions the machine has been taught to emmulate.

rdenney

2-Dec-2011, 07:08

I'm not sure what you're arguing in the last bit about editing. It's already a fact that a person selected images from google street view, and will have a show at a respected NYC photography gallery, and the practice is gaining momentum.

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/01/13/theory-meets-art-jon-rafman/

The appeal seems to be rooted in the fact that the photos are made by robots, and any meaning found in them is serendipitous. Can we doubt the future will see more sophisticated robot photographers?

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while. I'm not saying one cannot find worthy images from visual databases produced for some non-artistic systematic purpose. Many of us make photographs of reality that we believe results from a series of random effects. I'm arguing against the notion that technology will lead us to a point where selection can always happen after image capture, precluding the need for it to happen before. Selection is not just a matter of the frame we draw around the scene; it's also a matter of when we draw the frame. Unless that visual database covers all times as well as all places--which is hard to imagine anyone really wanting to do enough to build the necessary infrastructure--there will always be a place for creative selection before the image is captured.

The tendency is to extrapolate from the presence of a show that uses Google Street View, when in fact that show (or the path it's on) may turn out to be an oddity. Those who predict the future have been guilty of extrapolation forever--hence (trivially) movies in the 30's expecting us to have had flying cars long before now and such like. Have we already passed the year when Back to the Future Part Whatever predicted we would have levitating skateboards? It seems to me there are corrective influences present in the complex world that keeps any given pendulum from swinging too far in one direction.

Those corrective influences can be unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic. What would happen if the Internet was made so insecure, and the consequences of that insecurity so dangerous, that most people became afraid to use it? So much of what is driving new photo display approaches is driven by ubiquitous Internet access. That whole line of advancement could find a dead end. What happens if the power grid is attacked so profoundly that we have to learn how to live with ad hoc power? What if we learn that battery-making chemicals are so dangerous that we have to stop using them? Would we still want art if we had to live without battery-powered or grid-powered devices? What if we had a strong enough sunspot cycle to interfere with ubiquitous access to wireless Internet, to which we are all becoming dependent? (The current one is rather quiet, as any radio amateur will tell you.)

One characteristic that is present in many of the newer technologies is the dependence on infrastructure. And our use of any given useful infrastructure tends to expand to fill its capacity to the point where it becomes fragile. Any given natural disaster reveals just how fragile it is--no need for malice.

All this is to suggest that continued progress in one direction is a prediction that can be undermined or redirected by many things, most of which we can't think of. Humans are so adaptive as to roll with those changes easily. Often automated systems have to be redesigned to address those changes. Even systems that have a learning capability do so according to rules and boundary conditions that are subject to those changes.

We can certainly model what gives us pleasure, and describe automated processes according to those models. We can probably describe boundary conditions and rules within which most any outcome will give someone pleasure, and thus allow an artificial intelligence process to work. That doesn't mean a computer feels the pleasure, of course, or desires to produce a pleasurable work of art solely for that purpose. We could, of course, program the machine to appear to receive pleasure, so that a robot laughed or cried in a given set of conditions, or made a photograph that we might find beautiful. But the rules and boundary conditions would still be ours. We have trained ourselves to have more appreciation for art produced by random processes (particularly those controlled by some pleasurable or meaningful set of rules and boundary conditions), and this seems to me an outgrowth of believing that random processes are all-encompassing of our experience. Thus, we might get to the point where the random noise created by a machine would be meaningful to us (and to some it already is), but that doesn't mean the machine cares that we enjoyed it. I think artistic joy will always be an organic if not human trait.

Rick "thinking this gets into the deep waters of semiotics" Denney

Jay DeFehr

2-Dec-2011, 09:59

Gentlemen,

Thank you for your thoughts. I think I might not have made my position very clear, and I'll try to correct my course here.

jcodlslabs,

I think anytime a person is involved there is bias, and I think our judgement about the quality of any given work always includes some context, explicit or implicit. I'm not arguing that robot photographers should replace human ones, but that every photograph is a man/machine collaboration, and there is a spectrum along which the collaboration is weighted, and further, that the more rapid evolution of machines relative to men is shifting the weighting towards machines, and further still, that machine intelligence is changing the nature of the machine's role in the collaboration. All of the examples I've given are meant to support one or more of the above points, and not to suggest the end of human art is nigh, or that you should find another medium.

Paul,

I agree the machines referenced haven't risen to the level of originality we expect (but don't always get) from human innovators, but that shouldn't suggest the capacity for innovation is beyond the scope of machine intelligence. I think we need to understand human innovation better than we do before we can rule it out for machines. I think Bloom begins to address this issue, and one strategy of Cope's EMI is to combine existing styles to form a hybrid, which is also a human form of innovation. A case can be made that evolutionary algorithms do innovate, since evolution is synonymous with innovation. The more we learn about human cognition, the more we begin to resemble the machines we create. Again, I'm not claiming machines will replace human artists, just that we have a lot to learn about both human and machine intelligence, and the more we learn, the more similar they become.

Rick,

The blind squirrel is a nice analogy, and illustrates there are many paths to any end, and further, it illustrates an assumption about the way cognition works. Are you sure sight is the primary sensory mechanism a squirrel uses to locate acorns, or are you making the assumption based on the way you would find an acorn?

To be clear, I'm not arguing for "the notion that technology will lead us to a point where selection can always happen after image capture, precluding the need for it to happen before." If I want a photo of my children at the Grand Canyon, I'm not likely to place them there and wait for the google car to find them. I'm arguing that post capture image selection is an emerging form, the implications of which are meaningful in a larger context.

The tendency to extrapolate is related to path dependence, the result of which has gifted us with our qwerty keyboards- permanent oddities. That we can identify a path is enough to wonder about where it will lead.

Unless that visual database covers all times as well as all places--which is hard to imagine anyone really wanting to do enough to build the necessary infrastructure--

The above doesn't require anyone to build the infrastructure, it requires everyone to do it, and we are. This is the difference between an emergent phenomenon and a designed one. Again, I think absolute thinking is not productive here, and it's more useful to think in terms of a spectrum. No one denies the number of cameras in operation is increasing exponentially, and with them the time/image space captured by them. We can speculate about the path dependency implications of that fact, and reasonably argue that it will continue, barring some unforeseen disaster.

Unforeseen disasters have impacted evolution in the past, and there's no reason to believe we're exempt from such influences now, though we have made considerable gains in insulating ourselves from them. The Pinatubo eruption came close to ending our species, and the Plague in Europe devastated the culture, including the temporary loss of several technologies, resulting in the Dark Ages. But the descendants of the survivors of the Pinatubo eruption went on to invent agriculture, survive the plague and see the Renaissance, develop the scientific method, create industry, etc., etc. The evolution of any particular line either weathers the storms of uncertainty and continues, or comes to an end. The internet is an emergent phenomenon, like a market, and as long as there are people, they will want to trade and communicate. If solar flares wipe out the entire internet (which would make the Dark Ages look like a brown out), provided there are survivors, they will recreate it in some form. Technology has evolved at an accelerating rate since the invention of the first tool, despite natural disasters, war, famine and market fluctuations. If it didn't, we probably wouldn't have it, and the more technology evolves, the more disaster resistant we/it becomes. Pinatubo wouldn't represent anything like a species-ending threat today, thanks to technology.

We can argue about what is theoretically possible for a machine, but aren't we engaging in the same kind of extrapolation you warned about? History is as replete with examples of pessimism regarding the evolution of technology that was proven unfounded as it is with examples of unrealistic optimism, and historically, betting on impossibility has been a bad bet.

Again, I claim the following:

Every photograph is a man/machine collaboration

There is a spectrum along which the collaboration is weighted

The more rapid evolution of machines relative to men is shifting the weighting towards machines

Machine intelligence is changing the nature of the machine's role in the collaboration.

Thanks again for a great discussion.

Mike Anderson

2-Dec-2011, 10:00

...there will always be a place for creative selection before the image is captured....

I don't think anyone would argue against that.

But to put another slant on this computer art stuff:

Most conceptual art doesn't do much for me, it goes over my head or in one eye and out the other. But "art" "made" by a machine to me seems very conceptual, timely and pertinent, and tends to be (to me) interesting, humorous, and even scary. Maybe it's just the nerd in me.

...Mike

Heroique

2-Dec-2011, 10:27

Gentlemen ... a case can be made that evolutionary algorithms do innovate, since evolution is synonymous with innovation ... the more rapid evolution of machines relative to men is shifting the weighting towards machines.

Paging HAL 9000. LF Forum paging HAL 9000. Please report to The Future of Photography thread. Thank you.

Mike Anderson

2-Dec-2011, 10:32

Paging HAL 9000. LF Forum paging HAL 9000. Please report to The Future of Photography thread. Thank you.

I'm sorry, Heroique. I'm afraid I can't do that.

...HAL

rdenney

2-Dec-2011, 10:44

Are you sure sight is the primary sensory mechanism a squirrel uses to locate acorns, or are you making the assumption based on the way you would find an acorn?

To be clear, I'm not arguing for "the notion that technology will lead us to a point where selection can always happen after image capture, precluding the need for it to happen before." If I want a photo of my children at the Grand Canyon, I'm not likely to place them there and wait for the google car to find them. I'm arguing that post capture image selection is an emerging form, the implications of which are meaningful in a larger context.

"Blind" is easier to write than "lacking the senses required to know the acorn is there without just bumping into it at random", but in this case it means the same thing.

My discussion of selection was in the context of Struan's serendipity, and why technology does not avail itself to serendipity the way humans do.

You are taking this on a much grander arc than any of my discussion was intended to reach. Large effects are the result of many small effects, which are in turn the result of many, many smaller effects. I sense that you are trying to understand or theorize about larger effects on the basis of smaller effects. I just don't think it works that way. There are too many unpredictable turnings in the scaling process. The technologies we are discussing now might come or go without being noticed a thousand years from now, or even a hundred years from now.

I do not think that ubiquity of cameras, even if it continues to grow exponentially, will ever reach the point where it could be considered comprehensive. Long before it reaches that point, some corrective influence (which could even be some more effective form of sensing) will interpose itself.

An example: We now use a lot of video for traffic control. We use it to detect the presence of cars at intersections, to monitor traffic flow on roadways, and sometimes for enforcement. But the reason we use it at intersections is to know when to serve a movement at a traffic signal, and for how long. And the reason we monitor traffic is to know when congestion is appearing, how bad it is, what causes it, what we can do to alleviate that cause, and what we can do for travelers affected by it. Video is imperfect for all of these applications, except the one that makes good use of human understanding (whose observation video makes possible), which is diagnosing the cause of unexpected traffic congestion. We are already looking for cheaper and easier to maintain technologies. Microwave sensors are becoming popular. Inductance loop sensors imbedded in the pavement are still popular. Cameras are also being used for traffic enforcement, partly for sensing and partly for evidence gathering. We need them for gathering evidence because they don't work that well for sensing in many cases.

Likewise, the ubiquity of cameras for security purposes is a statement on our inability to detect foul play without the use of human judgement. As with red-light-running, the camera is more useful as a post-mortem evaluation or evidence-gathering tool than as a preventative tool. As people become more paranoid about privacy (which is confined to older wackos like us but which will eventually come up even in the Facebook generation), they will apply a corrective influence and the use of those cameras will diminish in favor of sensing approaches that detect foul play more directly. This will happen merely for efficiency purposes--human observers are, in fact, too serendipitous to be reliable in a security or surveillance chain.

Note that I'm not arguing, and haven't been arguing, against the notion that post-capture image selection can be an art form, and even an important art form.

Rick "exposing a little professional bias" Denney

Jay DeFehr

2-Dec-2011, 12:37

Rick,

I got your point about randomness, and I hope you got mine about alternative cognitive mechanisms.

..technology does not avail itself to serendipity the way humans do.

I would amend the above to read, technology does not avail itself to serendipity in all of the ways humans do. Clearly some of the ways technology exploits serendipity are shared with humans.

Regarding the grand arc, specific technologies are not important, but the progress of technological evolution is, and in this sense, the small effects and the large effects tell the same story. camera coverage need not be comprehensive to manifest the effects of increasing ubiquity, among which is the emergence of post-capture image selection as an art form. I haven't been arguing that post-capture image selection will replace intentional image capture, and since you're not " arguing, against the notion that post-capture image selection can be an art form, and even an important art form.", it's not entirely clear to me about what we disagree.

Your traffic control and surveillance examples are excellent ones of human/machine collaboration, and support my claims quite well.

I don't think you would argue that automated traffic control is not a human/machine collaboration

or that the machine component of the collaboration is not evolving faster than the human component

or that there is not a human--machine spectrum along which the collaboration is weighted

or that the weighting isn't shifting towards the machines

or that machine intelligence is not changing the nature of the machine's role in the collaboration.

Traffic rules originally functioned solely to prevent collisions, and consisted of a set of rules regarding a driver's responsibilities at an intersection. This can be considered internal human intelligence, as intersections were not marked with any instructions to drivers, and the rules were stored in the mind of the driver. As motor vehicles and the roads they traveled became more ubiquitous, the intelligence was externalized in the form of marked/controlled intersections, the rules for which were posted on signs, which constituted communication, or by mechanical, moving barriers (RR X-ing). The rules were simple at first; stop before proceeding when clear, and evolved in complexity to include more complicated rules for right of way sequences, etc. But traffic control really began with the traffic light, which was controlled by either a program (timed) or a sensor (traffic controlled). This marks the advent of machine intelligence in traffic control, and a driver was required to subordinate his own judgement to the control of the signal; one is not permitted to proceed through a red light, even if the way is clear. This is a man/machine collaboration designed to keep people safe, but as the traffic system evolved, the need to improve efficiency emerged as a second order objective, and the weighting of the collaboration continues to shift towards machines. Machine intelligence has changed the nature of the collaboration. By the the addition of sensors, the role of the machines has expanded to include observation and reporting to authorities.

So, the pattern applies to more than just photography.

paulr

2-Dec-2011, 13:05

I agree the machines referenced haven't risen to the level of originality we expect (but don't always get) from human innovators, but that shouldn't suggest the capacity for innovation is beyond the scope of machine intelligence.

I have little doubt that this is true, and that we're going to see all kinds of artistic explorations that are basically human / machine collaborations. Simple algorithms can lead to complex and unpredictable behaviors; the need for human intelligence is in spotting any remarkable results.

So one of the keys to this kind of endeavor is an insightful, open-minded human collaborator to make selections.

Another key is a good algorithm, one that's more fruitful than the proverbial million monkies at typewriters who will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare (no one I know wants to be those monkeys' editor).[/QUOTE]

rdenney

2-Dec-2011, 13:47

This is a man/machine collaboration designed to keep people safe, but as the traffic system evolved, the need to improve efficiency emerged as a second order objective, and the weighting of the collaboration continues to shift towards machines. Machine intelligence has changed the nature of the collaboration. By the the addition of sensors, the role of the machines has expanded to include observation and reporting to authorities.

So, the pattern applies to more than just photography.

I don't think anyone will argue that much art (and particularly photography) requires interaction with apparatus, and that the capability of the apparatus changes what the artist might have to or choose to think about. I can't much think of anything in what you said to respond to, so I'll leave it at that.

Some corrections in traffic control, though: Traffic signals are not put in for safety. All-way stops are safe enough, they just operate poorly. Traffic signals are put in for efficiency, pure and simple, as right-of-way assignment devices that are more efficient than static methods using signs (of whatever type), and cheaper than using police officers to direct traffic. So, safety is not a motivating objective, but rather a constraint. We work within the boundaries of safe practice. The notion of safety as a purpose is a myth rampant among many observers, with the notion that there is a big knob on a signal controller that could be turned right to make it more safe and left to make it more efficient. Experts realize that the relationship between the two is so complex and subject to so many influences that one really has to be treated as a constraint on the other, rather than a combined (or competing) objective.

I seriously doubt that artistic objectives could be nearly as clearly articulated as our objectives with traffic control, and yet it has taken us half a century even to realize the need to do so. That takes me back to: With art, there are only fuzzy concepts.

Rick "somewhat relieved by that, actually" Denney

Heroique

2-Dec-2011, 14:15

I'm sorry, Heroique. I'm afraid I can't do that.

...HAL

What’s the problem, HAL?

Jay DeFehr

2-Dec-2011, 15:28

Rick,

I defer to your traffic control expertise. My clumsy history was meant to acknowledge traffic control began as a safety measure, and evolved to an efficiency optimization system, and now a monitoring/reporting system. Thank you for the deeper explanation of the relationship, I actually find it rather interesting.

Paul,

Well said, as always.

Mike and Heroique,

I recently re-watched 2001 and Solaris (Tarkovsky) and was reminded how great science fiction cinema can be. I also watched The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky again) and Melancholia, and was reminded how much Von Trier owes to Tarkovsky.

jcoldslabs

2-Dec-2011, 15:34

Rick,

"The relationship between the two is so complex and subject to so many influences that one really has to be treated as a constraint on the other, rather than a combined (or competing) objective."

This statement of yours (very well put, by the way) can easily be applied to the relationship between a person and his or her image capture/editing device. Broadly, is this not true of any human being interacting with any given tool? The limits of human ability and the limits of the tool itself create the framework within which the interaction takes place (the infamous "box" that people often try to think outside of). Children often have wildly innovative thoughts in part because their relationship to the world is relatively new and free from its influences. Could not "thinking" machines be programmed to return to a tabula rasa state from which their experience of the world (photographic or otherwise) is brand new and therefore the choices they make would be free from the complex web of influences that we all labor under? This might lead to "innovation-assist" technology of some kind. Although, as previously pointed out, the influences on the system of the hardware designers and software programmers might he harder to mitigate.

Unfortunately for this discussion language is also a tool and I, for one, struggle to achieve the desired result within the constraints imposed.

Jonathan

rdenney

2-Dec-2011, 16:41

...Children often have wildly innovative thoughts in part because their relationship to the world is relatively new and free from its influences. Could not "thinking" machines be programmed to return to a tabula rasa state from which their experience of the world (photographic or otherwise) is brand new and therefore the choices they make would be free from the complex web of influences that we all labor under?

There is value in experience.

Children have wildly innovative thoughts, but most of them are utterly unfeasible, which becomes (sometimes painfully) clear when execution is attempted.

Machines are programmed to achieve goals, not undermine them. Thus, even learning machines are constrained to the box you describe--the boundary of what seems sensible to the machine's creators. When a machine undermines its objective, that's considered a failure and the learning process eliminates that path from future choices (or the machine is modified to do so).

Most automation processes that are intended to find a "best" answer first model the system performance under an initial set of circumstances. Then, they alter the controls applied to those circumstances and model the results. They repeat this (something machines are good at) until they can determine the best answer. They may do that by brute force (considering all possible answers), they may use a search algorithm (to find a reasonable best answer but not necessarily the absolute best answer), or they may have modeled the performance of the system well enough to calculate a direct optimization. They may even learn by doing, rejecting those control moves that undermine the quality of the answer.

Two major errors occur with this type of process when used in complex systems: 1.) we don't know what the conditions are (or what they will be when the controls are applied), or 2.) we don't know what objectives to pursue. The latter is fatal to optimization efforts, and that is exactly what makes traffic control so difficult. It turns out that the objectives of the operation are so bound up in societal goals and political influences that we can't characterize them quantitatively in many cases. Engineers (non-fictionists) do not like this at all, believe me. Artists (fictionists) don't necessarily expect it in the first place.

We can fix the first error by sensing instead of modeling, and the addition of better sensing to systems aims to solve the problem of having poor or unattainable models. But models are cheaper--in the engineering world, we'd much rather be able to assume the conditions than have to measure them in the three-dimensional world.

In art, we have no models at all, it seems to me. If I knew more about art theory, I might have a different way to say that, maybe by saying something clever such as all models are false but some are useful. But maybe even more important is that we don't know what our objectives are. We might not even believe in objectives, and I suspect that will be a very difficult position for a machine to find itself.

Thus, a machine with no objectives can only attempt random directions, and then somebody or something has to judge whether the direction is fruitful, because maybe the objective becomes clear only when the art achieves it. (This concept shatters me completely, by the way.) In the art that depends on random processes, that judgment cannot be ignored. We all know that Pollock must have thrown some canvases away that did not pass muster. And we all know that Pollock experimented endlessly with different apparatus to find those that did pass muster. That's the selection that Paul is talking about. And that's exactly what was done extracting framed still images from Google Street View (Google had objectives, of course, they were just utterly unconcerned with art objectives).

My definition of serendipity, as I sense Struan using the word, is abandoning old objectives and claiming new objectives that appear unexpectedly, even when they defy understanding. I suppose a machine could attempt that. But it might be no better than a human in selecting a fresh objective clearly enough to execute something. And I doubt mightily that we could develop a machine that would work autonomously and productively without objectives at all.

Rick "not really liking where this leads" Denney

jcoldslabs

2-Dec-2011, 16:58

"Maybe the objective becomes clear only when the art achieves it."

Many novelists describe just this phenomenon: they begin with a situation, a character, or simply a title, and the process of writing is a process of discovery. Only when they have completed the work do they look back and realize what they have wrought. This process would seem to be one of hypersensitivity to moment-by-moment serendipity. Since there is no clearly defined objective at the start (only a vague one) the novelist must be sensitive with each sentence to the larger work taking shape on the page.

"I won't know what I'm doing until I've done it." This would be a difficult objective for a machine to achieve, I agree.

Jonathan

Jay DeFehr

3-Dec-2011, 11:54

I just read an interesting statistic related to data mining, of which post-capture image selection is one example. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman at Google, " From the dawn of civilisation until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days — and the pace is accelerating". That means more than 300 times as much data has been generated since 2003 as before 2003.

Imagine China and India as connected as Korea in the next decade.

jcoldslabs

3-Dec-2011, 14:45

Jay,

In regard to data mining and the volume of data to be mined, perhaps future personal photographic tools will be the algorithms and software designed to help sort through the pile, not the cameras themselves. If we ever achieve something akin to "global camera coverage" then the casual snapshotist could go on vacation without a photographic device, return home, plug in the dates and GPS coodinates of her trip and extract any images (still or video) of her time there from the "cloud," tweaking and cropping and editing as she likes.

Haven't we as photographers already lived through a preview of this? How many of us have been invited to an event and had other people say, "I don't need to bring a camera because ______ will be there with his?" In this case other people are perfectly willing to accept our view of things and get copies of our photos afterward rather than take their own.

And speaking of data, over the past few years I have been scanning 25 years worth of negatives and transparencies and I feel that the work will never be completed--and I am adding to the pile nearly every day with new work. I have to imagine when I am gone my heirs will look at this huge pile of negatives and--despite my best organizational efforts--being overwhelmed will ditch it all.

However, I am not on Facebook, but my wife is, and she posts many of my images there--both snaps and more creative work. After three years she has amassed a very large collection of our photos ranging from recent work to 100 year-old family photos. I can't help but feel that THIS will be my photographic legacy and that any images still in analog form will be at risk for future generations even though I suspect the longer term viability resides with the analog versions. Will my 8x10 negatives be to my grandchildren what my grandparents' 78s are to me?

Jonathan